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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
This article examines the English reception of an Italian song by Lully, ‘Scocca pur tutti tuoi strali’ (LWV 76/3), and its importance for English music of the late seventeenth century. In English sources, this song exists in arrangements for keyboard, and for two violins and bass. It was also the source of a five-bar bass formula used variously in the 1680s. Purcell, for example, clearly used the bass, or an adapted version of it, as an ostinato pattern in three instances. ‘Scocca pur’ is the clearest example of a model composition in Italian style that was known to English musicians in the late seventeenth century. By implication, Italian-style compositional practice was developed from a limited number of models, which were adapted freely, disseminated aurally, and modified to suit native tastes and practices.
I am grateful to Martin Adams, Rebecca Herissone, Peter Holman, Alan Howard, Alexander Silbiger, Michael Talbot and Andrew Walkling, who kindly read and commented upon earlier drafts of this article. I am also grateful to Margaret Murata for supplying me with a copy of her article ‘Guitar Passacagli and Vocal Arie’ (see note 5) and for additional information and corrections to my work on the Clark manuscript.
1 An Introduction to the Skill of Musick […] Corrected and Amended by Mr. Henry Purcell […] Printed by E. Jones, for Henry Playford (London, 1694), 144. For the nature of Purcell's contributions to this edition, see Rebecca Herissone, Music Theory in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford, 2000), 264–7. Italics in quotations throughout this article are as in the original sources.
2 On Purcell's use of ground bass, see especially Peter Holman, ‘Compositional Choices in Henry Purcell's Three Parts Upon a Ground’, Early Music, 29 (2001), 251–61, and Alan Howard, ‘Composition as an Act of Performance: Artifice and Expression in Purcell's Sacred Partsong Since God so tender a regard’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 132 (2006), 32–59. For Purcell's songs that utilize ground bass, see Peter Holman, Henry Purcell (Oxford, 1993), 36–7.
3 Christopher Simpson had previously used this bass in an example illustrating a three-part canon on a ground. See Holman, ‘Compositional Choices’, 256–7.
4 On the early history of the passacaglia and chaconne genres, see Alexander Silbiger, ‘On Frescobaldi's Recreation of the Chaconne and Passacaglia’, The Keyboard in Baroque Europe, ed. Christopher Hogwood (Cambridge, 2003), 3–18. On their roots in earlier Spanish and Italian guitar tablatures, see Thomas Walker, ‘Ciaconna and Passacaglia: Remarks on their Origin and Early History’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 21 (1968), 300–20 (pp. 315–17), and Thomas Hudson, ‘Further Remarks on the Passacaglia and Ciaconna’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 23 (1970), 302–14.
5 For comment on the status of the chaconne and passacaglia as genres, see Alexander Silbiger, Italian Manuscript Sources of 17th Century Keyboard Music (Ann Arbor, MI, 1980), 39–41. For further consideration of how ‘passacagli’ belonged to an ‘aria type’ in Italy in the first quarter of the seventeenth century, see Margaret Murata, ‘Guitar Passacagli and Vocal Arie’, La monodia in Toscana alle soglie del XVII secolo: Atti del Convegno di Studi, Pisa, 17–18 dicembre 2004, ed. Francesca Menchelli-Buttini (Turin, 2007), 81–116.
6 See Hudson, ‘Further Remarks on the Passacaglia and Ciaconna’, 311–12, and Silbiger, ‘On Frescobaldi's Recreation of the Chaconne and Passacaglia’, 7–8. A new thematic catalogue of Frescobaldi's works has emanated from a project directed by Alexander Silbiger: see Frescobaldi Thematic Catalogue Online, <http://frescobaldi.music.duke.edu/> (accessed 15 March 2013).
7 Biagio Marini, Per ogni sorte di strumento musicale: Libro terzo, opera XXII (1655), ed. Ottavio Beretta, Monumenti musicali italiani, 19 (Milan, 1997).
8 On the repertory of Italian vocal music in printed collections in France, see Anne-Madeleine Goulet, Paroles de musique (1658–1694): Catalogue des ‘Livres d'airs de différents auteurs’ publiés chez Ballard (Wavre, 2007).
9 For a recent discussion of Rossi in the French context, see Alessio Ruffatti, ‘La réception des cantates de Luigi Rossi dans la France du Grand Siècle’, Revue de musicologie, 92 (2006), 287–307.
10 Antoine Bauderon de Sénéce, Lettre de Clément Marot a Monsieur de […] touchant ce qui s'est passé, à l'arrivée de Jean Baptiste de Lulli, aux Champs Elysées (Cologne, 1688; repr. Lyons, 1825), 30. For an English translation of the portion relating to Rossi, see James R. Anthony, ‘Lully's Airs: French or Italian?’, Musical Times, 128 (1987), 126–9 (p. 127). For further discussion of the letter and Rossi's influence on Lully, see Ruffatti, ‘La réception des cantates de Luigi Rossi’, 292–5.
11 For Le bourgeois gentilhomme, see John S. Powell, Music and Theatre in France 1660–1680 (Oxford, 2000), 213–14, and John S. Powell, ‘Le bourgeois gentilhomme: Molière and Music’, The Cambridge Companion to Molière, ed. David Bradby and Andrew Calder (Cambridge, 2006), 121–38. In Alcidiane, a ‘Petitte Chaconne’ serves as a ritornello to be performed before and after two Italian airs. The airs employ a chaconne-like idiom, the first of them being entitled ‘Recit Italiens [sic] chanté Par M.elle de la Barre & la s.ra Anna Bergerotti’ (F-Pn Rés. F. 507, p. 66).
12 Alexander Silbiger, ‘The Roman Frescobaldi Tradition, c.1640–1670’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 33 (1980), 42–87 (pp. 71, 85).
13 For sources, see London, British Library MS Add. 39569 (‘Babell MS’), facsimile edn with an Introduction by Bruce Gustafson, Seventeenth-Century Keyboard Music, 19 (New York, 1987).
14 On vocal music by Rossi in French sources, see Eleanor Caluori, The Cantatas of Luigi Rossi: Analysis and Thematic Index, 2 vols. (Ann Arbor, MI, 1981), and Alessio Ruffatti, ‘“Curiosi e bramosi l'oltramontani cercano con grande diligenza in tutti i luoghi”: La cantata romana del Seicento in Europa’, Journal of Seventeenth-Century Music, 13 (2007), <http://sscm-jscm.press.illinois.edu/v13/no1/ruffatti.html>.
15 See Atto Melani, Complete Cantatas, ed. Roger Freitas, Yale University Collegium Musicum, Second Series, 15 (Middleton, WI, 2005), no. 8.
16 See Holman, Henry Purcell, 33–5.
17 For comparison of the two settings, see Ian Spink, English Song from Dowland to Purcell (London, 1974), 217–18.
18 A published collection of a similar kind was Scelta di canzonette italiane de piu autori (London, 1679), compiled by the castrato Girolamo Pignani. On Pignani, see Richard Goodall, Eighteenth-Century English Secular Cantatas (New York, 1989), 33.
19 For the full quotation and others from Pepys, see Gloria Rose, ‘Pietro Reggio: A Wandering Musician’, Music and Letters, 46 (1965), 207–16 (pp. 211–12).
20 For a list of the contents of Harleian MS 1501, see Catalogue of Manuscript Music in the British Museum, compiled by Augustus Hughes-Hughes, 3 vols. (London, 1906), ii, 59.
21 The manuscript features a seven-point foolscap watermark typical of post-Restoration manuscripts. For comment on this type of watermark in music paper, see Robert Thompson, ‘English Music Manuscripts and the Fine Paper Trade, 1648–1688’ (Ph.D. dissertation, King's College, London, 1988), 393–4.
22 For recent discussion of the tablature in this manuscript, see Alexander Dean, ‘The Five-Course Guitar and Seventeenth-Century Harmony: Alfabeto and Italian Song’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rochester, Eastman School of Music, 2009), 269–71. The second copyist was responsible for sacred music possibly by either Boniface Graziani or Marc Antonio Ziani, as well as for the copies of the songs by Lucio. He left space for Reggio to copy accompanying guitar parts, but not all of these were completed.
23 Although probably understood as originating in Italian vocal music of the kind copied by Reggio into his manuscript compilations (in which, significantly, the songs have become divorced from their original operatic contexts), certain specific musical contexts associated with the descending tetrachord in the minor are known to have existed in Italy earlier in the seventeenth century. This was notably the case for the so-called Venetian Lament, associated especially with the chromatically descending form. On the minor descending tetrachord as an ‘emblem of Lament’, see Ellen Rosand, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice: The Creation of a Genre (Berkeley, CA, 1991), 369–86. Evidence that northern musicians understood these associations in the same way as their Italian counterparts, however, is often contradictory. See Alexander Silbiger, ‘Bach and the Chaconne’, Journal of Musicology, 17 (1999), 358–85 (pp. 359–63).
24 For a recent discussion of Charpentier's Magnificat, see Lois Rosow, ‘The Descending Minor Tetrachord in France: An Emblem Explained’, New Perspectives on Marc-Antoine Charpentier, ed. Shirley Thompson (Aldershot, 2010), 63–87 (pp. 83–6).
25 For previous comment on this piece, see especially Robert Klakowich, ‘Scocca pur: Genesis of an English Ground’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 116 (1991), 63–77, and Rosow, ‘The Descending Minor Tetrachord in France’, 64–6.
26 The title ‘Ritournelle de Tetio’ is found in the partbooks of Nicholas Dieupart (US-NH Filmer MS 33).
27 Klakowich, ‘Scocca pur’, 67–8.
28 An example is F-Pn Vm7 4 (pp. 44–9).
29 See Herbert Schneider, Chronologisch-thematisches Verzeichnis sämtlicher Werke von Jean-Baptiste Lully (Tutzing, 1981), 505, and Klakowich, ‘Scocca pur’, 69. For sources of ‘Vorrei scoprirti’, see Caluori, The Cantatas of Luigi Rossi, no. 265.
30 Klakowich, ‘Scocca pur’, 66–7. The attribution to Draghi resulted from confusion over the identity of Draghi and Lully in the English sources; these composers were both known in England simply as ‘Baptist’.
31 Most of the sources are listed in Schneider, Chronologisch-thematisches Verzeichnis, 505; Carl B. Schmidt, ‘Newly Identified Manuscript Sources for the Music of Jean-Baptiste Lully’, Notes, 44 (1987), 7–32 (pp. 18, 21, 22, 27, 28 and 30); and Klakowich, ‘Scocca pur’, 66–7.
32 See Robert Shay and Robert Thompson, Purcell Manuscripts: The Principal Musical Sources (Cambridge, 2000), 134–5. Shay and Thompson have given this copyist the codename ‘London A’, and suggest that he might have been the organist Francis Pigott (d. 1704). The manuscript also contains an index in the hand of the Chapel Royal organist William Croft.
33 For Babel's connection with Lully's music, see especially Bruce Gustafson, ‘The Legacy in Instrumental Music of Charles Babel, Prolific Transcriber of Lully's Music’, Jean-Baptiste Lully: Saint-Germain-en-Laye and Heidelberg 1987, ed. Jerôme de la Gorce and Herbert Schneider (Laaber, 1990), 495–516, and Herbert Schneider, ‘Un manuscrit de Charles Babel restitué à sa bibliothèque d'origine’, Revue de musicologie, 87 (2001), 371–94.
34 See F-Pn Rés. F. 578, p. 34. I am grateful to Peter Holman for drawing my attention to this parallel.
35 Powell, Music and Theatre, 348. See Powell, Music and Theatre, 339–48 for a full and illuminating discussion of La princesse d’Élide.
36 This feature, of course, has its roots in grounds by earlier seventeenth-century composers. See, for example, several keyboard settings by Byrd in which the ground is conceived as suitable for positioning at either the top or the bottom of the texture; see, for example, nos. 36 (‘The Carman's Whistle’) and 43 (‘Ground’) in William Byrd, Keyboard Music: 1, ed. Alan Brown, Musica Britannica, 27, 3rd edn (London, 1999).
37 Patxi del Amo has recently drawn attention to a manuscript for a piece entitled ‘Mr Francis Pollwheels Division on Mr Peter Young's Ground’, suggesting both a possible identification for the composer of ‘Mr Powlwheels […] Ground’ and the likelihood that it was written originally for viol. See Patxi X. del Amo Iribarren, ‘Anthony Poole (c.1629–1692), the Viol and Exiled English Catholics’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Leeds, 2011), 219–24. I am grateful to Andrew Ashbee for drawing my attention to this identification. For the genealogy of the Polwhele family and all known versions of the piece for viol, see Andrew Ashbee, ‘The Mystery of Polewheel and his Ground’, Viola da Gamba Society Journal, 5 (2011), 1–13.
38 See Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, Mysterien-Sonaten (‘Rosenkranz-Sonaten’): Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München Mus. Ms. 4123, facsimile edn, ed. Ernst Kubitschek (Bad Reichenhall, 1990). For a transcription, see Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, Rosenkranz-Sonaten, ed. Dagmar Glüxam, Denkmäler der Tonkunst in Österreich, 153 (Graz, 2003).
39 For the keyboard version of this piece, see John Blow, Complete Harpsichord Music, ed. Robert Klakowich, Musica Britannica, 73 (London, 1998), no. 70.
40 Early examples that are exceptions appear not to be by English composers. Among these are two a3 pieces: a ‘Ground’ in C minor by Michel Farinel and an anonymous ‘Passacaille’ in D minor, both in GB-Och Mus. 1183, fols. 1–12. The bass parts for these do not survive. However, the character of the upper parts indicates that the bass in each case closed on the dominant note. For GB-Och Mus. 1183 as a whole, see Peter Holman, Four and Twenty Fiddlers: The Violin at the English Court 1540–1690 (Oxford, 1995; repr. 2000), 321–3, and Silas Wollston, ‘The Instrumentation of English Violin-Band Music, 1660–1685’ (Ph.D. dissertation, The Open University, 2009), 125–44.
41 I am grateful to Peter Holman for drawing my attention to the appearance of ‘Scocca pur’ in the ‘new Consort Bookes’. The label ‘Mr Grabus Ground’ is written below the notation of the ‘Scocca pur’ bass, and below that is a copy of the bass for John Banister's ‘A Division on a Ground’ in F major (The Division-Violin (London, 1685), no. 19), which has no label. To judge by proximity, however, the label ‘Mr Grabus Ground’ appears to refer to ‘Scocca pur’.
42 Klakowich, ‘Scocca pur’, 73–6.
43 This piece will be included in English Keyboard Music 1650–1695: Perspectives on Purcell, ed. Andrew Woolley, Purcell Society Companion Series, 6 (London, forthcoming).
44 This is a type of variant that does not seem to have resulted from textual corruption of one kind or another, or to reflect a meaningful revision process.
45 For examples of typical variants between versions of keyboard pieces, see Andrew Woolley, ‘An Unknown Autograph of Harpsichord Music by William Croft’, Music and Letters, 91 (2010), 149–70 (pp. 158–65). These variants were probably created because, within a particular contrapuntal and harmonic framework existing in the mind of the composer before pen was put to paper, a number of possible realizations were considered feasible. For further discussion of the role of memory in the creation of both vocal and keyboard repertory, see Rebecca Herissone, Musical Creativity in Restoration England (Cambridge, 2013), esp. Chapter 6.
46 For Add. MS 22100, see Shay and Thompson, Purcell Manuscripts, 169–71.
47 ‘When you make a Second Treble to a Tune, keep it always below the Upper Part, because it may not spoil the Air: But if you Compose Sonata's, there one Treble has as much Predominancy as the other’ (p. 116). For further brief comment on this passage in the context of other contemporary writings, see Herissone, Music Theory, 205–6.
48 Other sonatas from the same collection are known to have been composed in the early 1680s, given their inclusion in the autograph GB-Lbl Add. MS 30930. For manuscript sources of other sonatas in Ten Sonatas, see Shay and Thompson, Purcell Manuscripts, 87, 113–17.
49 For recent comparisons between these G minor pieces, see Restoration Trio Sonatas, ed. Peter Holman and John Cunningham, Purcell Society Edition Companion Series, 4 (London, 2012), Introduction.
50 The strong Purcellian characteristics of this piece, anonymous and untitled in the source, have previously been noted by Peter Holman and Christopher Hogwood, who were unaware of its origins in Sound the Trumpet. See Christopher Hogwood, ‘The “Complete Keyboard Music” of Henry Purcell’, The Keyboard in Baroque Europe, ed. Hogwood, 67–89 (pp. 82–3). The arrangement is to be included in the forthcoming revised Purcell Society edition of Purcell's keyboard music.
51 The use of ‘Scocca pur’ as an archetype makes it comparable with other ground-bass pieces that served as models. An example is the solo ‘With him he brings the partner of his throne’ from Purcell's 1686 Birthday Ode for James II, Ye Tuneful Muses (Z.344/11a). This piece exists in a contemporary keyboard arrangement, probably by Purcell himself, which was reworked by Croft. See William Croft, Complete Harpsichord Works, 2 vols., ed. Howard Ferguson and Christopher Hogwood (London, 1974; rev. edn 1982), Appendix: Misattributed Works, and no. 3a.
52 The piece is attributed to ‘G. F.’, assumed to be Finger. See Robert Rawson, ‘From Olomouc to London: The Early Music of Gottfried Finger (c.1655–1730)’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2002), esp. pp. 7 and 219. At the top of the page on which the piece appears is the inscription ‘Mr Arnald / A Denmark Gen: / July 30 / '92’, which suggests an approximate date of composition.
53 See John Milsom, Christ Church Library Music Catalogue (<http://library.chch.ox.ac.uk/music>, accessed 15 March 2013), entry for Mus. 1128.
54 See John Milsom, Christ Church Library Music Catalogue (<http://library.chch.ox.ac.uk/music>, accessed 15 March 2013), entry for Mus. 1128.
55 Copy consulted: GB-Och Mus. 807. On King, see Peter Holman, ‘King, Robert’, Grove Music Online, <http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/15021> (accessed 27 September 2012).
56 Apollo's Banquet […] The Sixth Edition (London, 1690), ‘The Third Part’, no. 42. Another ground that was given a similar title, ‘An Italion Ground’, uses a romanesca-type bass in the minor. This was published in The Delightful Companion: or, Choice New Lessons for the Recorder or Flute […] The Second Edition (London, 1686), p. [11], and as ‘An Italian Ground’ in The Division-Violin, no. 35. For other sources of ‘An Italion Ground’, see Peter Holman, ‘Continuity and Change in English Bass Viol Music: The Case of Fitzwilliam MU. MS 647’, Viola da Gamba Society Journal, 1 (2007), 20–50 (<http://www.vdgs.org.uk/files/VdGSJournal/Vol-01.pdf>, accessed 15 March 2013).