Iacobus Leodiensis [Iacobus de Montibus, Iacobus de Oudenaerde]

(ii) 17th-century English practice.

In just the manner described by Agazzari, there was a flourishing school of instrumental improvisation in England in the 17th century. Variation was a process inherited from the virginalists, and English instrumentalists were fond of improvising diminutions or variations on popular songs such as Greensleeves, itself based on the passamezzo antico. From this practice it was only a simple step to composing an original ground and repeating it ad libitum while another instrumentalist or two improvised divisions on it. A valuable source for this practice is Christopher Simpson’s Division Violist (1659);ex.7 shows excerpts from a set of divisions from it for solo bass viol. The vocal lines of English continuo songs were also subjected to extensive embellishments of various kinds, and several manuscript sources are largely devoted to such florid songs (see Till, 1975).

Thomas Mace (Musick’s Monument, 1676) is one of the most cogent witnesses to improvisatory instrumental practices in England. For him the Praelude is

a Piece of Confused-wild-shapeless-kind of Intricate Play … in which no perfect Form, Shape, or Uniformity can be perceived, but a Random-Business, Pottering and Grooping, up and down, from one Stop, or Key, to another; And generally, so performed to make Tryal, whether the Instrument be well in Tune, or not … After they have Compleated Their Tuning, They … fall into some kind of Voluntary, or Fanciful Play, more Intelligible; which … is a way, whereby He may more Fully, and Plainly shew His Excellency, and Ability, than by any other kind of undertaking; and has an unlimited, and unbounded Liberty.

Mace also writes of improvising an interlude in order to make a transition from a ‘suit[e] of lessons’ in one key to one in another key: ‘They do not Abruptly, and Suddenly Begin, such New Lessons, without some Neat, and Handsom Interluding-Voluntary-like-Playing; which may, by Degrees, (as it were) Steal into That New, and Intended Key’. In addition he offers an unusual account of the creation of the lesson entitled ‘The Authors Mistress’, published in Musick’s Monument. In his description of playing his lute at random when alone he provides a rare account of ‘spontaneous’ improvisation, with no functional purpose nor any reference to a pre-existing framework.

Thomas Morley devoted a substantial proportion of his Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597) to improvised vocal counterpoint, stating that ‘when a man talketh of a Descanter it must be understood of one that can, extempore, sing a part upon a plainsong’. His examples of descant reveal sophisticated techniques: imitation, canon, double counterpoint and inversion. Morley stated that this art, though still very much in use in churches elsewhere, had declined in England by the end of the 16th century – yet Elway Bevin discussed it as late as 1631 in A Briefe and Short Instruction (see Ferand, op. cit., 1956).

Improvisation, §II, 3: Western art music: Baroque period

(iii) French practice.

While the influence of Caccini's expressive, text-orientated style of ornamentation can be seen in Guédron's declamatory récits for solo voice, notated diminutions in both polyphonic and solo forms of the early 17th-century air de cour show that, in general, performers imitated the purely melodic formulae of earlier Italian practice. ‘Passages are especially pleasing when they are sustained, and last a long time’, wrote Mersenne in 1637. Slow-moving songs for solo voice on melancholy subjects received the most profuse ornamentation. A specifically French practice arose in the air de cour as sung by a soloist, whereby florid diminutions were concentrated in the second and later verses, to give the effect of a musical variation on the ‘simple’ melody presented in the first verse. A melody thus embellished was termed a diminution in the air de cour and a double (or second couplet) in the later air and air sérieux. Ex.8 shows an air de cour by Antoine de Boësset (taken from Mersenne) with Henry Le Bailly's diminution for verse 2. Moulinié's lighter ornamentation for verse 1 features the port de voix that anticipates the beat, the appoggiatura type most favoured in France before the 18th century. According to Mersenne, French airs were set apart from those of Italy, Germany and Spain because good singers like Le Bailly added trills extempore in diminutions and at cadences, ‘the more so as at those moments the voice is greatly softened and doubles its charming motion’. The signs for ornaments in ex.8, namely a cross for cadences (trills) with two to four repercussions, and the letter m for longer cadences, were not printed in the original text; Mersenne added them later by hand to his personal copy of his own treatise. Other graces besides trills and dynamic shadings regularly left to the performer's discretion included the plainte and the accent.

Diminution practice based purely on melodic and metrical considerations is still the focus of La belle méthode, ou L'art de bien chanter (1666) by the Besançon musician Jean Millet. However, from Mersenne onwards this approach had been censured for failing to take the text into account. Bénigne de Bacilly's Remarques curieuses sur l'art de bien chanter (1668) details the art of ornamentation typical of a new generation of singers, whose roulades were now tailored to the importance and length of syllables. Bacilly's exemplar was Michel Lambert, the greatest singer of Louis XIV's reign. While Bacilly's list of specific graces is much longer than Mersenne's, most were still left to the discretion of the singer to supply. Lambert committed many of his doubles to print, yet remarked in the preface to his Airs of 1660: ‘I would have dearly liked to be able to mark in my score all the ornaments [graces] and subtleties [petites recherches] that I try to bring to the performance of my airs, but these are things no-one has discovered how to write down’. Lully apparently disliked the practice of doubles for dramatic reasons, and later theorists devoted relatively little space to diminution techniques, but written-out examples in the songbooks show that doubles in the style of Lambert were sung well into the following century.

Improvised embellishment in instrumental music tended to reflect vocal practice. Jean Rousseau dedicated his Méthode claire, certaine et facile pour apprendre à chanter la musique (1678) to Michel Lambert, and in his Traité de la viole (1687) he set out to transfer Lambert's style to the viol. It contains the illustrations seen in ex.9, together with elaborate rules for the placing of the port de voix and tremblement in performance. Anticipating the beat by taking value from the preceding note was a technique not generally used in keyboard music, although there are rare examples in the récit of Nivers' Suite du 1er ton from his third Livre d'orgue (1675). All the ornaments in Couperin's L'art de toucher le clavecin (1716) begin on the beat.

Notated agréments are often lacking in 17th-century instrumental music as well as in vocal music, and must be added by the performer. The music of Louis Couperin, for example, contains few written ornament signs. In the later Baroque period, by which time written symbols were in general use, the degree of precision with which François Couperin and Marin Marais set them down is nevertheless unique. Montéclair's section on ornaments in his Principes de musique (1736), a noteworthy attempt to standardize ornament names and signs, makes it clear that graces were still often left to the performer's ‘taste and experience’ to supply. Most important in his array of 18 agréments (‘those who perform it badly will never sing pleasingly’) was the tremblement (trill), which he subdivided into four types. Expressive ornaments include the son enflé et diminué (crescendo and decrescendo), for which he claimed the invention of the modern ‘hairpin’ signs. Montéclair's examples, and the evidence of his own music, show that he did not object to virtuoso passage-work as such, but he was very much against free diminution (his term is passage) that obscured the melodic line. In his opinion, instrumentalists used it to excess out of their desire ‘to imitate the style of the Italians’.

Du Mont advertised his petits motets of 1652 with continuo as being the first of their kind to appear in France, but, as in Italy, a tradition of adding instruments impromptu to accompany (or replace) voices preceded the advent of the continuo. Untexted bass notes, found from time to time in polyphonic airs de cour from Guédron's second book of 1612 onwards, indicate the need for an accompanying instrument. A ‘basse continue pour le luth’ is mentioned by name in Moulinié's third book (1629), and a ‘basse continue pour les instruments’ in Boësset's seventh book (1630).

Other typically French aspects of improvisatory practice concern rhythm. Stylish performance of French Baroque music in general called for a knowledge of conventions of overdotting and notes inégales, which for the sake of flexibility and subtlety were not expressed in the notation. Players of the harpsichord, lute and viol were expected to improvise the entire rhythmic fabric of many preludes, which were printed only in skeletal form in long notes and with very few ornament signs. (See Dotted rhythms; Notes inégales; and Prélude non mesuré.)

Improvisation, §II, 3: Western art music: Baroque period