Yesterday evening in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, Voices of Music began the San Francisco leg of their concert season with a program entitled Stylus Phantasticus: 17th-Century Music of Italy and Germany. As I observed in my preview piece, the title comes from the Baroque theorist Athanasius Kircher. It appears in his 1650 treatise Musurgia Universalis, in which it is listed as one of nine “modes of expression” (styli expressi). The relevant passage was reproduced in the program notes as follows:
The fantastic style is appropriate for instruments; it is the most free and most unrestrained method of composing, it is bound to nothing, not to any words nor to a melodic subject: it was developed to display creativity and to teach the hidden design of harmony and the ingenious composition of harmonic phrases and fugues. It may especially be seen in those works which are commonly called fantasias, ricercars, toccatas and sonatas.
In many respects the history of Western music may be marked into phases on the basis of different approach to how (in the spirit of Ludwig Wittgenstein) adjectives like “free” and “unrestrained” were put to use. The earliest practices of music, whether vocal or instrumental, probably knew very few restraints; and, since those practices predate any efforts toward notation, they were not even restrained by “performing parts.” Indeed, notation emerged to document instances of practice to overcome the limitations of human memory, rather than to impose constraining specifications on how music should be performed. In the seventeenth century the idea of a composer sitting down to write something that others would perform (perhaps even without the presence of that composer) was far from as normative as it would become in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Nevertheless, concepts like “free” and “unrestrained” were, in fact, constrained by normative practices of “how things are done” in every period of music history; and last night offered some stimulating insights into those practices in seventeenth-century Italy and Germany. In both settings there were diverse approaches to virtuosity on the part of solo instruments, but that virtuosity was frequently embedded in some basic structural framework. Thus there were compositions by both the Italian Tarquinio Merula and the German Samuel Scheidt based on dance forms whose structures would continue to prevail into the following eighteenth century. Similarly, both cultures made extensive use of a simple repeated ground bass pattern, above which more and more elaborate melodic and contrapuntal patterns would unfold.
This latter approach was illustrated in the most familiar terms by concluding the concert with Johann Pachelbel’s D major canon. This composition received such overwhelming attention towards the end of the twentieth century that the mere suggestion of it borders on cliché. However, with three violins (Lisa Grodin, Katherine Kyme, and Carla Moore) playing above a continuo consisting of cello (William Skeen), theorbo (Dominic Schaner), archlute (David Tayler), and organ (Hanneke van Proosdij), one could listen to a clear statement of its “unrestrained” melodic elaborations and the many ways in which, through canonic imitation, they could wind around each other.
Other approaches to “fantastic” invention were based on resources other than familiar forms. Van Proosdij shifted from organ to sopranino recorder for a canzona by Merula intended to imitate the sounds of the nightingale. In an entirely different vein the concert began with a composition in which spatial structure dominated, a sonata by Biagio Marini for three violins performing “in echo.” This began as individual phrases that would “reflect” from one solo instrument to the next; but, by the end of the sonata, the “echoes” would be reflecting on themselves in an overlay of canonic imitations.
Regardless of how any of this inventiveness found its way into notation, Voices of Music did a splendid job of reminding us that, whatever devices the composer may have conjured, the music is always in the performance. Thus, as had been the case when the American Bach Soloists began their SummerFest concerts last July with selections from the same century and the same countries, the overall spirit of the evening was one of “Jamming in the Seventeenth Century.” Whatever marks may have been on the pieces of paper on the music stands, the performers consistently came up with fresh approaches to playing off of each other, and this was particularly the case when Skeen took up his gamba to abandon his continuo duties in place of engaging with the other solo strings. The seventeenth century never sounded so refreshing.
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