4
Unruly Passions and Courtly Dances
Technologies of the Body in Baroque Music
Susan Mcclary
Most musicians and classical music connoisseurs today assume they have some acquaintance with French baroque dance: they can identify its principal types (allemande, courante, sarabande, gigue, etc.); they can recognize or even perform several examples of each. Yet the examples of French dance they are most likely to know and hold in highest regard as musical works were composed not at Versailles, but by a German—Johann Sebastian Bach. Without question, the frequency with which Bach composed French dance suites and drew on the characteristic rhythms of its specific types, even in his sacred music, testifies to the international prestige of the genre. But Bach's posthumous status as the cornerstone of the German musical canon has encouraged many to receive his homages to French dance as paradigms of the genre itself. Consequently, we have learned to hear the dances actually produced at Versailles through the filter of Bach's music; we value them as important influences, yet often dismiss them as immature or deficient in comparison to the standard later set by Bach.
We could entertain several reasons for Bach's high esteem relative to his forebears in French dance. To mention only the most obvious, most composers pale in direct comparison with Bach. But I would suggest that the contrasts between Bach and his French models do not reflect merely his unparalleled technical skill; rather, they emerge from the very different cultural contexts within which these musicians worked, especially their radically different notions of the relationship between music and the body.
In this essay, I want to examine the place of the body in baroque music. I have two principal reasons for doing so. First, the body has become
a topic of tremendous interest in recent years in the humanities and social sciences: the pioneering studies by Michel Foucault have made the history of the body in its relationships to power a matter of unusual urgency;[1] feminist theorists such as Genevieve Lloyd, Susan Bordo, and Judith Butler have likewise focused extensively on the body in their efforts to unravel the tangled cultural associations between gender and mind/body metaphysics;[2] and philosopher Mark Johnson and linguist George Lakoff posit the body as the very basis of all knowledge, thus clearly privileging the body in their resolution of the mind/body opposition.[3] In my own work, I have claimed that music constitutes a cultural medium that involves not only the activities of the mind but also multifaceted aspects of embodied experience. By studying music's engagements with the body at various moments in history, I hope to inject music into those discussions that now flourish in other parts of the academy.[4]
Second, I am raising issues concerned with the body because of their potential for illuminating music itself, especially French baroque music, which was so strongly tied to the dance. To do so, however, means violating some of musicology's fundamental aesthetic tenets. Roman Ingarden, for instance, has written: "We may doubt whether so-called dance music, when employed only as a means of keeping the dancers in step
[1] For Foucault, see especially Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979); and History of Sexuality , vol. 1: An Introduction , trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1980). See also Bryan S. Turner, "Recent Developments in the Theory of the Body," in The Body: Social Process and Cultural Theory , ed. Mike Featherstone, Mike Hepworth, and Bryan S. Turner (London: Sage, 1991), 1–35; Randy Martin, Performance as Political Act: The Embodied Self (New York: Bergin & Garvey, 1990); and Susan Rubin Suleiman, ed., The Female Body in Western Culture (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986).
[2] See Genevieve Lloyd, The Man of Reason: "Male" and "Female" in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Alison Jaggar and Susan Bordo, eds., Gender/Body/Knowledge: Feminist Reconstructions of Being and Knowing (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990); and idem, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: Routledge, 1993).
[3] Mark Johnson, The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Translation theorist Douglas Robinson similarly identifies the body as the primary site for the production of linguistic meaning; see The Translator's Turn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991).
[4] See my Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); and, coauthored with Robert Walser, "Theorizing the Body in African-American Music," Black Music Research Journal 14 (1994): 75–84. See also Richard Leppert, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
and arousing in them a specific passion for expression through movement, is music in the strict sense of the word."[5]
Such disavowals of the body have resulted in skewed views of musical culture, which always relates strongly to the human body in some way, even if the relationship sometimes takes the form of denial or attempted transcendence. When we turn to baroque music, especially in France, we cannot avoid the body's centrality without making nonsense of the music—as performers and scholars trained in the Italo-German tradition have demonstrated repeatedly. It is not, therefore, for the sake of following fads that questions about the body need to be brought to music, for the body has always been there. Rather, the current interrogation of the body in the academy finally bestows legitimacy on a topic that ought never to have been banished: the constant interaction between music and bodies.
Let me clarify a few issues before proceeding. By "the body" I do not refer to some strictly biological, transhistorical. entity. This is not, in other words, an essentialist project. Quite the contrary: if humans are born with bodies having certain organs, characteristics, and potentials, they are from birth exposed to cultural forces that shape the uses and experiences of those bodies. Thus, matters that seem "natural"—such as kinetic repertories, gendered behaviors, structures of erotic feelings, and what baroque theorists called "the passions"—are in fact heavily mediated by socially based codes, customs, rituals, and discourses. In the title of this essay I use Foucault's expression "technologies of the body" to identify music as one of the means by which people learn about their bodies—how to move, how to feel, how (finally) to be .
In pluralistic societies, the power of music to thus affect what is perceived as "natural" often provokes heated debates. This should be self-evident to us in the twentieth century, when so much ink has been spilled decrying the influences of African-American music—the ability of its rhythms to mold those attracted to it, first by introducing an articulate vocabulary to parts of the physique that many white Americans would like to pretend do not exist, and then by suggesting alternative modes of behavior or ways of being. Testifying for the defense, the grand master of funk George Clinton gleefully flaunts his motto: "Free your ass and your mind will follow."
This is, of course, precisely what the other side dreads, and denunci-
[5] Roman Ingarden, The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity , trans. Adam Czerniawski (London: Macmillan, 1986), 46.
ations of music's capacity for corrupting listeners by means of improper appeals to the body recur throughout Western history, from Plato's arguments for policing music in the Republic to Augustine's and Calvin's fears that the wrong kinds of music incite sensuality.[6] Such battles resurfaced with particular vehemence in France during e seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For instance, in his account of the hysteria over music generated during the guerre des bouffons , d'Alembert presented the following satirical version of the argument he opposed: "All liberties are interrelated and are equally dangerous. Freedom in music entails freedom to feel, freedom to feel means freedom to act, and freedom to act means the ruin of states. So let us keep French opera as it is if we wish to preserve the kingdom and let us put a brake on singing if we do not want to have liberty in speaking to follow soon afterwards."[7]
D'Alembert here parodies a kind of slippery-slope logic, whereby we slide rapidly from music to feeling to action to collapse of the state, exactly as in Plato, whom this passage deliberately echoes in its apparent horror of liberty. The assumed culprit here is neither the luxury-loving Lydians so despised by Plato nor the purveyors of rhythm and blues condemned by evangelists in the 1950s, but rather the usual demonized Other of the French establishment, namely, Italian music. For d'Alembert writes in the midst of yet one more in a long series of attempts to purge from France the pernicious example of Italian musical license.[8]
We tend to scoff at such debates today, secure in the belief that music is only music. But I would argue that French authorities were absolutely right in trying to suppress Italian music, given their ideological priorities. Indeed, nothing less was at stake than two radically incompatible epistemologies, each grounded in a different concept of the body. If George Clinton celebrates the liberation of mind by way of the ass, Louis XIV most assuredly did not.
Musicologists have long been aware of some of the relationships between the body and the music at Versailles. The scholarly contributions on court
[6] See my "Music, the Pythagoreans, and the Body," in Choreographing History , ed. Susan Foster (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 82–104; and "'Same as It Ever Was': Youth Culture and Music," in Microphone Fiends Youth Music and Youth Culture , ed. Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (New York: Routledge, 1994), 29–40.
[7] J. le Rond d'Alembert, La Liberté de la musique (1759), in Oeuvres de d'Alembert , vol. 1 (Geneva: Slatkine, 1967), 520; my translation.
[8] For French documents lauding and condemning Italian music, see the excerpts from François Raguenet's Parallèle des Italiens et les Français (1702) and Le Cerf de La Viéville's Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique française (1705), both in Source Readings in Music History , ed. Oliver Strunk (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), 473–507.
dances by Meredith Little and Wendy Hilton, for instance, emphasize the necessity of knowing something of the steps and choreographic moves assumed by contemporaries when we play, say, a courante at the keyboard.[9] Nor do their guidelines apply only to pieces identified explicitly as dances, for dance so pervaded French culture that it informed most other musical genres as well. In accordance with Louis's priorities, French musicians maintained dance at the center of their activities; even vocal pieces often moved according to the rhythmic impulses of dance-types.
Why should dance have been the central idiom in France at this time? One reason, of course, is that Louis XIV was himself an accomplished dancer who took personal delight in performing in ballets and at balls. Explanations that rely too heavily on pleasure, however, can invite trivializing assessments—such as this one by Paul Henry Lang (notice the language dripping with feminizing tropes): "The music all these [French baroque] composers cultivated was in the sign of the dance, so congenial to the French, with its neat little forms, pregnant rhythms, great surface attraction, and in tone and structure so much in harmony with the spirit of the age. This music, though slight and short-breathed, was elegant and so different from any other that the whole of Europe became enamored of it."[10]
But pleasure was only part of the reason for the French court's interest in dance. As José Maravall and Lorenzo Bianconi have argued, much baroque art was designed to function as propaganda to further the agendas of the state or church in consolidating power. Robert Isherwood's Music in the Service of the King traces the extensive networks of political control that governed artistic production specifically at Versailles, and he shows how Louis XIV employed dance and its music to regulate—indeed, to synchronize —the bodies and behaviors of his courtiers.[11] Yet this po-
[9] See Meredith Little, "Recent Research in European Dance, 1400–1800," Early Music 14 (1986): 4–14; and Wendy Hilton, Dance of Court and Theater: The French Noble Style, 1690–1725 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981); also Patricia Ranum, "Audible Rhetoric and Mute Rhetoric: The Seventeenth-Century French Sarabande," Early Music 14, no. 1 (1986): 22–39; and Betty Bang Mather, assisted by Dean M. Karns, Dance Rhythms of the French Baroque: A Handbook for Performance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987).
[10] Paul Henry Lang, introduction to Jean-Baptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque: Essays in Honor of James R. Anthony , ed. John Hajdu Heyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 1.
[11] See José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure , trans. Terry Cochran (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986); Lorenzo Bianconi, Music in the Seventeenth Century , trans. David Bryant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and Robert Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973). See also Rudolf zur Lippe, Geometrisierung des Menschen and Repräsentation des Privaten im franzäsichsen Absolutismus (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat Reprise, 1979).
litical control rarely revealed itself as raw power; rather, it was cloaked in appeals to bon goüt or platonic order. Thus the formal balls at which courtiers danced served as moments where the ideals of court society were realized in a literal sense, with participants enacting—as though spontaneously and with supreme grace—a world in which everyone operated of one accord, following a schema seemingly as inevitable as the harmonia of the Pythagorean spheres.
Note that within this ideological system the body—far from representing a subversive element—was aligned with mathematics, for Renaissance Neoplatonists held that the properly disciplined body served as a conduit between celestial order and the soul.[12] Drawing on such beliefs, codes of official behavior at Versailles arranged for the body to perform and make visible hegemonic structures of mind and political authority, just as the geometrical grid of trees at Versailles seemed to reveal the platonic law of nature itself. A long tradition of Western transcendentalism contends that the spirit is cruelly confined within the corruptible body. In Discipline and Punish , however, Foucault argues that beginning in this period it was the body that was imprisoned by the soul.[13] He views the court of Louis XIV as a transition between a time when punishment was meted out ritually upon the body to one in which authorities employed surveillance and disciplines to colonize interiority, so as to control behavior from the inside.
Nor did the king exempt himself from this regimen of ideological control. His body was glorified as the state-made-flesh, and Louis himself appropriated sacramental imagery and ritual to elevate his corporeal being into the realm of divine mystery.[14] Every aspect of his physical appearance was sculpted and choreographed to maximize the desired effect. And in his ideal society courtiers followed suit—in dance, in deportment, in behavior, and (at least theoretically) in thought.
[12] See Gary Tomlinson, Music in Renaissance Magic: Toward a Historiography of Others (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), esp. chap. 3. Although bodily affects were viewed as potentially discordant, music of the proper sort could have the effect of aligning the soul with the cosmos, thus bringing together (as the Greeks had not) the categories of musica mundana and musica humana .
[13] Foucault, Discipline and Punish , 30: "The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body." For an exploration of the more traditional view, see Michael A. Williams, "Divine Image—Prison of Flesh: Perceptions of the Body in Ancient Gnosticism," in Fragments for a History of the Human Body , pt. 1, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Urzone, 1989), 128–47.
[14] See Louis Marin, Portrait of the King , trans. Martha M. Houle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988); and Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
If French authorities assumed that the minds of noblemen would adopt the patterns given to them in cultural practices such as dance, this was not necessarily the way things actually worked. Recent historians have questioned the extent to which such ideological structures were in fact internalized by courtiers. Norbert Elias argues that courtiers accommodated themselves to codified rituals not because they were duped, but because the conspicuous consumption demanded by peer pressure made them economically dependent on the king and thus vulnerable to his whims. Moreover, as they watched their power as feudal heirs drain away, they increasingly defined their nobility in opposition to other classes: their affiliations with other aristocrats thus became largely a matter of performance as they participated collectively in a choreography of the ethos that distinguished "good society."[15] Jonathan Dewald, however, reveals that courtiers often bridled under the "gentle" coercion to which they were subjected: in diaries and other personal narratives, the gap between the ideal and the real seethes with resentments, family conflicts, and illicit desires and behaviors.[16] Recall too that many French writers took up the cause of Italian music, in open resistance to official policy.
In other words, the consensus celebrated in official courtly art was but a thin veneer. Not even the most carefully controlled piece of propaganda can rely on surefire results, free from gaps, moments of slippage, and promiscuous chains of signifiers. As Mark Franko, for instance, demonstrates in his book on dance and the ideology of the French baroque body, even the most geometrical dances still had to include motion (the movement of bodies from one pattern to the next), a necessary element that always threatened to undo the mapping of bodies onto mathematics. And in moments of greater license—especially in the period before Louis XIV came to power—court dances gravitated away from the Pythagorean allegories of the sixteenth-century ballet de cour and into burlesque performances that foregrounded narrative action, verbal play, and the Bakhtinian grotesque body (Louis himself occasionally performed in drag during his youth).[17] It was in that same relatively open period that Mazarin in-
[15] Norbert Elias, The Court Society , trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983).
[16] Jonathan Dewald, Aristocratic Experience and the Origins of Modern Culture: France, 1570–1715 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
[17] Mark Franko, Dance as Text: Ideologies of the Baroque Body (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); see also Franko's essay in this collection. See further Peter Maxwell Cryle, Geometry in the Boudoir: Configurations of French Erotic Narrative (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994).
troduced Venetian opera into France and that Louis Couperin developed the unmeasured prelude.[18]
When Louis XIV ascended the throne, he didn't so much put away childish things as he harnessed them to do his bidding. Geometrical dance returned with a vengeance, and courtiers were pressed to submit to its discipline as they performed the ritual of dancing two-by-two before the king. Now, this was no small requirement, for a typical ballroom choreography lasted two to three minutes, with few repeated patterns, and courtiers had to have about twelve of these elaborate arrangements on call at any given time.[19] Saint-Simon recounts how a young noble newly arrived at court destroyed his career when he tried to dance without knowing the proper moves: as he turned continually in wrong directions and pranced out of the designated orbit, he betrayed his status as an outsider and provoked gales of malicious laughter from the assembly. He was driven from court in disgrace, his social and economic future reduced to rubble, so privileged a place did dance occupy within the intricate web of social knowledge that defined court society.[20]
Thus whether or not the official imagery succeeded in disciplining not only the body but also the mind, it is crucial for those concerned with the history of such images to observe how they were engineered to accomplish those purposes. And here we must turn to Jean-Baptiste Lully, an Italian dancer who became Louis's music czar and who worked self-consciously to develop a musical practice that would reinforce the reigning ideology.[21] In pragmatic terms this involved negotiating among various demands, imposed by the drama at hand, the prevailing, carefully measured style of speech declamation, and the bodily patterns of dance.
Let us take as an example a brief air from the prologue to Lully's opera
[18] On the introduction of Venetian opera into France, see Neal Zaslaw, "The First Opera in Paris: A Study in the Politics of Art," in Heyer (ed.), Jean-Baptiste Lully , 7–23.
[19] Hilton, Dance of Court and Theater , 11–12.
[20] M. le duc de Saint-Simon, Memoirs of Louis XIV and the Regency , trans. Bayle St. John (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1926), 19–20; quoted in Hilton, Dance of Court and Theater , 15.
[21] Lully (1632–87) began his career as a fourteen-year-old dancer in an Italian opera troupe that was visiting Paris. When the troupe returned home, Lalli/Lully remained, insinuated himself into Louis's favor through his abilities in dance, and eventually was granted a monopoly over most musical production at court. It is therefore not surprising that he bent official style so as to spotlight his own talents. Paul Henry Lang writes: "In this ascent to a commanding position he deftly used everyone from the king down. The lettres patentes and the privilèges he secured from the king were so outrageous that they could not have stood the slightest legal scrutiny, but they could not be scrutinized because they came directly from the king. This adroit manipulator did succeed in becoming the virtual dictator of French musical life" (introduction to Heyer [ed.], Jean-Baptiste Lully , 2).
Alceste (1674).[22] As with most of the productions designed for Louis's court, this prologue presents an allegory in praise of the Sun King, commemorating an earlier triumph over Franche-Comté. A figure identified as a "Nymph of the Seine" bemoans the absence of her "hero" and languishes while awaiting his return. Eventually, a fanfare announces the hero's victory, and Louis himself is fêted—honored both as `the principal spectator of the drama about to unfold and as the principal spectacle around whose glory all else revolves.
The Nymph's air adopts the rhythmic impulses of the sarabande, which, though rumored to have descended from a New World ritual of unbridled sensuality, had long since been tamed into the most stately of the court dances. Its primary characteristic is a slow triple meter in which the second beat receives unexpected emphasis, associated in dance with a lift onto the toes that is sustained for the remainder of the measure (not an easy feat, given the tendency of ankles to wobble). The resulting contrast between motion and suspended animation marks the sarabande and informs the Nymph's sung discourse. A set of conventions designed for regulating the body pervades the air, from its note-to-note sequences to its periodic phrases that correspond to groups of dance steps. And although Lully sprinkles his tune with graces (indicated by the marks above the staff), these agrémens serve as much to reinforce the dance gestures and to brake any inadvertent momentum as to adorn the melody.[23]
The Nymph's air follows the formal plan of a rondeau, in which a refrain returns between slightly contrasting sections (ABACA ; ex. 4.1). In this particular rondeau, the refrain itself operates recursively as an ABA structure. The first line, "Le Héros que j'attens ne reviendra-t'il pas?," divides symmetrically, each half contained within two measures, thus setting the pace, the norm against which the rest of the air unfolds. With the next phrase, "Serai-je toujours languissante / Dans une si cruelle attente," the Nymph begins to resist the established rhythm; as she works toward continuous motion she threatens (as much as was allowed within this style) to overflow the bounds of the expected phrasing. But reason saves the
[22] Jean-Baptiste Lully,Alceste ; recording, La Grande Ecurie et le Chambre du Roy, Jean-Claude Malgoire, conductor (Columbia M3 34580); score: Oeuvres Complètes de J.-P. Lully, Opèras , vol. 2, ed. Henry Prunières (Paris: Editions de la Revue Musicale, 1932), 13.
[23] Note that such music was also analyzed in terms of poetic meters. See, for instance, Bénigne de Bacilly,A Commentary upon the Art of Proper Singing (Paris, 1668), trans. Austin Caswell (New York: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1968). Although airs such as this one were thus multiply constrained, I am concerned here with intersections with the body.
Example 4.1
Lully, Alceste , Prologue: The Nymph of the Seine, mm. 1–15
day: her increased animation leads back safely to the opening line, which recontains and seals the refrain with a gesture of closure.
Lully's strategy recalls one of the instances of bon goût recorded admiringly by Madame de Sévigné. A young woman of the court had been Jilted by the chevalier de Lorraine. When she encountered him one day, she launched into a tirade against him. He—ever mindful of her best interests—deflected attention to the pet she had with her: "That's a pretty little dog you've got there. Where did you get it?" As Madame de Sévigné explains it, the chevalier thereby preserved the lady's dignity, restraining her from a display of passion that would have proved distasteful to the community.[24] This extraordinary disciplining of body and feelings was to be accomplished through the internalization of rules of rational order. As Elias explains,
[24] As recounted in Wilfrid Mcllors, François Conperin and the French Classical Tradition (New York: Dover, 1968), 32.
Why this attitude becomes important to court people is easily seen: affective outbursts are difficult to control and calculate. They reveal the true feelings of the person concerned to a degree that, because not calculated, can be damaging: they hand over trump cards to rivals for favour and prestige. Above all, they are a sign of weakness; and that is the position the court person fears most of all. In this way the competition of court life enforces a curbing of the affects in favour of calculated and finely shaded behaviour in dealing with people .[25]
To be sure, the Nymph's air contains conventional signs of sorrow: the minor key, the halting motion, the drooping melodic lines, the yearning appoggiaturas (ornaments that delay expected arrivals but that also enhance by "leaning" into them), and the depressed altered pitch on cruelle and in the harmony of m. 3. But these are subordinated to the patterns of dance—which, it turns out, is typical also of French performance treatises: whether the issue is violin bowing, text declamation, or ornament placement, the metrical impulses constitute the deciding factors.[26] Expressivity per se is rarely addressed; formal precision presides.
Modern scholars and performers have tended to ignore seventeenth-century French musical compositions, for these pieces work only if a bodily sense of weight shifts or lifts onto the toes can be perceived in the music; and such gestures depend on minute details of timing—details that cannot truly be captured with the blunt instrument of notation. But our problem is not only the difficulty of reconstituting nuances in the absence of any heard experience of the music. Far more daunting is a conceptual barrier, grounded in the mind/body metaphysics that has dominated thought about music since the nineteenth century: most modern performers actively resist having to factor in the body when studying "purely musical" phenomena. If French music relies on the body, then it would seem to be trivial as music; if it works as music , then the body ought to be irrelevant—or so the argument goes.
To return to Lully: if standard criteria of expression or formal innovation were brought to the Nymph's air, the piece would count as little more than competent. As we have seen, the affective devices Lully employs are quite minimal: emotional content clearly is not his main concern, nor would we expect it to be, given French taste. Moreover, the air follows restrained harmonic and structural conventions. What it does offer,
[25] Elias, Court Society , III; emphasis in the original.
[26] Kenneth Cooper and Julius Zsako, eds. and trans., "George Muffat's Observations on the Lully Style of Performance," Musical Quarterly 53 (1967): 220–45; Bacilly, Commentary on the Art of Proper Singing; François Couperin, L'Art de toucher le clavecin (Paris, 1716), trans. Mevanwy Roberts (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1933); and Betty Bang Mather, Interpretation of French Music from 1675–1775 (New York: McGinnis & Marx, 1973).
however, is a subtle series of nuances made up of varying degrees of motion, hesitation, and stability. If we are sensitive to the kinetic impulses of the sarabande, the constant motion that emerges with the words "Dans unc si cruelle attente" is exquisitely tense—a detail that strains slightly against the greater regularity of the surrounding context, making the return to the refrain and its lifts all the more gratifying.
The listener's body can experience vicariously those tentative hoverings, the unanticipated sequence of continuous steps, the reestablishment of equilibrium, but only if the performers articulate with the physical precision of French dance the delicate nuances indicated by Lully's ornaments and placement of harmonies. Performed well, the air appears to enact the aural equivalent of a geometric pattern or a theorem in the physics of motion; human expression seems almost trivial in comparison with this embodiment of Pythagorean order.
Like any repertory that influences the body, French baroque music went far beyond facilitating social dance. Through dance and its music, the Sun King could watch the social world move to the tunes he called: dance music at the French court thus filled functions similar to those Plato designated for Dorian music in his republic (indeed, Louis not only praised dance for its ability to enhance military discipline, but he also instituted the custom of having troops parade by him in choreographed review).[27] And this ideological relationship among dance, music, the body, and the state apparently had to be carefully insulated from alternatives—thus the polemical wars that sought to ward off the influence of foreign musics.
The music French critics regarded as the foremost threat to social order was the Italian music that swept through and conquered the rest of Europe precisely because it offered "freedom to feel." At first glance, Italian genres seem far less grounded in the body: dances appear on occasion, but they do not constitute the core of the repertories as they do in France.
[27] The patent for dance, for instance, states: "The art of dance has always been recognized as one of the most respectable and necessary to train the body and to give it the first and most natural dispositions to every kind of exercise, to that of arms among others; consequently, it is one of the most advantageous and useful to our nobility and to others who have the honour of approaching us, not just in war times, but even in times of peace in the divertissements of our ballets" (Peter Wollen, "Government by Appearances: The Arts, the Media and the Body Politic," paper delivered at the conference series "Constructing the Body," Los Angeles, 1992–93). A picture of Louis reviewing his troops appears in Foucault's Discipline and Punish; see fig. 1, following p. 169, and discussion pp. 188–89. See also Georges Vigarello, "The Upward Training of the Body from the Age of Chivalry to Courtly Civility," in Fragments for a Histoty of the Body , pt. 2, ed. Michel Feher (New York: Zone, 1989), 148–99.
Rather than manipulating the body in motion, the Italians sought primarily to invent a musical vocabulary for simulating—and stimulating—the passions.
Yet if they seemed to focus on producing analogues for the interior self, their images were grounded in somatic or bodily experience. Thus sorrow was represented by musical analogues to the body as it suffers grief, with slow, drooping motions; anger was recognized by its angular, aggressive gestures; anguish by its painful dissonances; happiness by rising, ebullient qualities; and so forth.[28] Once this inner landscape (what Stephen Greenblatt calls "inwardness") emerged,[29] culture sought to furnish and arrange it. What Julia Kristeva theorizes in music as the "semiotic" is not the privileged locus of the preoedipal imaginary, but rather the target of choice for cultural work.[30] That we often take these images as reflecting our own souls indicates why they should matter to historians.
By making a distinction between the body's inside and outside, I do not mean to ascribe any transhistorical reality to those categories: quite the opposite. If French music seems to favor moving the physical body at the expense of inwardness and Italian appears to prefer mapping interiority, both discourses remain constructs; each divides up and shapes human bodily experience in its own way. Yet their status as constructs did not prevent them from exercising tremendous influence in the social world. Indeed, French authorities exerted considerable effort to protect their subjects from Italianate musical images. Was this simply the result of monopoly logic or resistance to what Neal Zaslaw argues was Mazarin's attempt to colonize France with Italian culture?[31] Or was there something to fear in the music itself?
It is within the context of the sixteenth-century madrigal that composers
[28] See, for instance, Zarlino, Istitutioni harmoniche , bk. 4., chap. 32; araphrased in English by Thomas Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke , ed. Alec Harmon (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 290–91. Subsequent theorists were influenced by Descartes's The Passions of the Soul . For an eighteenth-century account of musical affect, see Johann Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister (Hamburg, 1739), trans. Ernest Harriss (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1981.). For a philosophical discussion of these issues, see Peter Kivy, The Corded Shell: Reflections on Musical Expression (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
[29] Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), esp. chap. 3.
[30] Julia Kristeva, Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art , ed. Leon S. Rondiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Rondiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 133–47.
[31] See Zaslaw, "First Opera in Paris," for an excellent account of what he calls Mazarin's attempted "politico-cultural colonization" of France by Italian art (7). He also explains that the politics were not only aesthetic, but often quite literal: because foreign musicians had opportunities as performers to infiltrate even private chambers, they often operated as spies (8).
first began to develop a musical vocabulary for denoting human feelings. Along with its other constructs, the madrigal produced the earliest explicit musical representations in the West of desire and pleasure, all spelled out in lavish detail. From Arcadelt's simulation of orgasm in "Il bianco e dolce cigno" to the erotic settings of the Song of Songs Schiitz wrote during his Venetian sabbatical, Italian music thrived on excess, on transgressing rules of order.[32] If the French vers mésuré sought to align poetry with platonic number, madrigalists notoriously ran roughshod over texts that were themselves prone to enjambment, overflowing bounds at every occasion. As the French admirer of Italian music François Raguenet describes it:
Everything is so brisk, sharp and piercing, so impetuous and affecting, that the imagination, senses, the soul, and the body itself are all betrayed in a common transport; 'tis impossible not to be borne down with the rapidity of these movements. A symphony of furies shakes the soul; it undermines and overthrows it in spite of all its care; the artist himself, whilst he is performing it, is seized with an unavoidable agony; he tortures his violin; he racks his body; he is no longer master of himself, but is agitated like one possessed with an irresistible motion.[33]
To give a relatively obvious example of the kinds of images and qualities of motion I mean (and the kinds that Louis's court demonized), Monteverdi's seventh book of madrigals, inspired by the baroque excesses of Marino's poetry, includes several pieces that explore what Stephen Greenblatt has called "friction to heat." At the time, it was thought that conception could not occur unless the female partner in the sex act were brought to fulfillment—a process of arousal that, according to Greenblatt, Shakespeare's quick, witty exchanges between lovers attempted to simulate.[34] (In our more enlightened time, "friction to heat" is more likely to be called foreplay, and it has been reduced from a status of necessity to one of mere courtesy or even altruism.)
Monteverdi's "O come sei gentile" is a duo, which allows the communicative immediacy of monody and also the complex images exploited by the polyphonic madrigal.[35] Guarini's text compares the state
[32] For a discussion of the Arcadelt, see my "Music, the Pythagoreans, and the Body"; Schütz's "Anima mea liquefacta es" will be discussed in my Power and Desire in Seventeenth-Century Music (in progress).
[33] Raguenet, Parallèle des Italiens et les Français , in Strunk (ed.), Source Readings , 478–79.
[34] Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 66–93.
[35] Listen, for instance, to the recording by the Concerto Vocale on the CD titled Monteverdi, Lamento d'Arianna , Helga Müller-Molinari and René Jacobs, voices; William Christie, harpsichord (Harmonia Mundi 901129); score: Settimo Libro de Madrigali (1619), cd. G. Francesco Malipiero (Vienna: Universal Edition, n.d.), 35–40.
Example 4.2
Monteverdi, "O come sel gentile," mm. 1–9
of a lover with that of a caged bird: both lover and songbird are imprisoned by their mistress and both sing for her; but the bird lives singing, while the lover singing "dies." The duo begins in a state of erotic languor as the first voice traces an extended moan of arousal, only to be choked off in a sudden frisson and release (ex. 4.2). This is an extravagant mapping of the feelings of the body, not as it operates within the social domain of dance, but as it is experienced most intimately. It gives public voice to private erotic feelings, or as Bakhtin says of cultural discourses: "Everything internal gravitates not toward itself but
is turned to the outside and dialogized, every internal experience ends up on the outside."[36]
To accomplish this within a milieu that stressed listener response, Monteverdi had to invent analogues that resonated sufficiently with shared experiences to be comprehensible. Of course, the mediated body he constructs here is far from universal: we have only to recall the disgusted responses of the French or to ask undergraduates to accept Monteverdi's languishing images as depictions of masculine subjectivity.[37] Yet such analogues allowed certain representations of sexuality to circulate widely as public currency, and they not only reflected but also helped to shape contemporary experiences of the erotic. In other words, Monteverdi's Marinist imagery also constitutes a technology of the body, albeit one that catered to the hedonistic individualism of Italian patrons, the subjectivist agendas of the Counter-Reformation, and the market economics cultivated for printed madrigals and Venetian commercial opera.[38]
By the end of the duo, the images have shifted considerably, the result of much friction between the two voices (both of which together, however, represent a single speaking subject—at least on one level). With the last line, "vivi cantando ed io cantando moro," the floodgates break and the voices careen forward unrestrained (ex. 4.3). Each seeks a point of closure, yet every would-be point of arrival is but the preparation for cadence by the other voice. The harmonies tumble vertiginously by fifths, occasionally moving obliquely so as to permit yet another downward spiral. The momentum is such that the cadence, when it arrives, cannot absorb the accumulated energies, and the process repeats even more extravagantly. That this too is an image based metaphorically on bodily experiences seems clear enough, though it is an imaginary body within the "virtual reality" of which we can soar, have orgasms that last for five minutes, and overwhelm all boundaries. If, as many of the French apparently did, we associate boundaries with rules of social propriety, it is easy to understand how such unabashed transgression of limits could
[36] Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics , ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 287.
[37] See also musicologist Gary Tomlinson's squeamishness about these pieces, which he sees as evidence of the collapse of Renaissance rhetorical prowess, in Monteverdi and the End of the Renaissance (Berkeley: University of California, 1987).
[38] See Lauro Martines, Power and Imagination: City-States in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); Maravall, Culture of the Baroque; Stanley Boorman, "What Bibliography Can Do: Music Printing and the Early Madrigal," Music and Letters 72, no. 2 (May 1991): 236–58; and Ellen Rosand, The Rise of a Genre: Seventeenth-Century Opera in Venice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991).
sound like the overthrow of the state, as d'Alembert's antagonists suggested much later.
I want to turn now to one of the musicians who responded to Italianate models in the years after Lully's death, namely, Marin Marais—a composer whose work unexpectedly reached a mass audience in 1992 with the release of the biographical film Tous les matins du monde .[39] Most of us shaped by the Italian style (later adopted by the Germans) find even the music from this period of détente alien, and we often characterize it largely in terms of what it lacks —namely, the teleological impulses of Italian tonality. To our ears, it may sound stagnant and rudderless, its motions minimal and arbitrary.[40] Yet Marais and his contemporaries can be heard as enacting a delicate cultural fusion. While the greater artistic leniency of Louis's later court permitted fusions of French and Italian procedures, Versailles still was committed to social discipline. Thus the problem facing Marais was how to negotiate between a French aristocratic sense of bodily propriety and the affective power of the Italian style.
Marais's "Tombeau pour M. de Ste -Colombe" is a piece in which the court composer commemorates the death of his teacher.[41] It displays several Italian traits, most obvious among them the descending chromatic tetrachord (theorized by Ellen Rosand as the emblem of the lament as it developed in mid-seventeenth-century Venice)[42] and an unusual number of harsh and sustained dissonances on strong beats. Occasionally, as in m. II, a melodic passaggio will hurl the action forward. Moreover, a Corellian modulatory schema holds the composition together, directing its progress away from and back to the tonic. In other words, many of the elements that had been associated with the emotional exhibitionism of Italian music appear here, along with the devices that produce teleological propulsion.
[39] Tous les matins du monde , directed by Alain Corneau; soundtrack under the musical direction of viol virtuoso Jordi Savall (Valois V4640, 1991).
[40] Even the dean of American French baroque studies often expresses such sentiments. In his French Baroque Music from Beaujoyeulx to Rameau (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), James Anthony damns a whole genre with the faintest of praise as follows: "In summary, French lute music of the seventeenth century is mannered, precious, even decadent; its melodies are surcharged with ornaments, its rhythms fussy, its harmony often aimless, and its texture without unity. Yet at the same time, it is never pretentious, it never demands more from the instrument than the instrument can give. In its own fragile way, it is honest to itself" (243).
[41] Marais, Second Livre de pièces de viole (Paris, 1701), ed. John Hsu (New York: Broude, 1986), 170–72; on soundtrack for Tous les matins du monde .
[42] Ellen Rosand, "The Descending Tetrachord: An Emblem of Lament," Musical Quarterly 55 (1979): 346–59.
Example 4.3
Monteverdi, "O come sei gentile," m. 78–end
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(example continued from previous page)
Example 4.3
(continued)
Yet it does not sound the same as Italian music, and cannot be made to sound the same. In my years coaching baroque music, I have repeatedly encountered incomprehension and frustration in performers trying to deal with the French repertory, which they often dismiss as incoherent. Marais, however, knew exactly what he was doing in producing this fusion, even though we need to recall his French priorities in order to make sense of his strategies. Most important, the piece is still inscribed on the dancing body: the tombeau is a special category of either the pavane or allemande. Thus, while it is an elegiac genre (in this case, explicitly invoking lament), it is still grounded in the regularized alternations of bodily motion typical of dance.
To be sure, it is heavily stylized as well; yet Marais ensures the latent physicality of his tombeau in a variety of ways. First, he distributes agrémens liberally and precisely throughout the piece. These ornaments serve a radically different function from those that flourished in contemporaneous Italian music. Unlike the improvised passaggi of Italian performers, French agrémens became standardized and virtually obligatory during the reign of Louis XIV: if ornaments represented the moments of greatest personal freedom and potential excess in the Italian style, they
were the moments most heavily policed in France. The ornament tables that proliferated in France bear witness to this site of discipline. By contrast, Italians learned to add their extravagant melodic passages by listening, in apprenticeships, or by studying manuals on improvisation. In Italy, ornaments changed ideally with each performance; in France, they were determined by the composer and were to be executed accordingly.[43] If French music exhibited extraordinary grace, this grace was to signify the joy of submitting to authority: ornaments made these moments seem like the voluntary surrender to bon goût .
But it was not simply the autocratic desire to control that led French composers to dictate ornamental practice in their music. The sense of bodily motion central to the style relies on carefully choreographed patterns of weight shifts, and this, too, is accomplished in no small part by the agrémens , which secure any accumulated tensions to strong beats and release them. Jacques Attali advises us to pay attention to the ways musical styles define and negotiate between order and noise,[44] and in French baroque music the noise is localized, intensified, and dispelled through these frequent clusters of dissonance. Alternations of tension and release occur on a very low level, in keeping with the demands of dance. Recall that Mark Franko points to motion as the destabilizing force in geometrical French dance; motion also is the element most carefully patrolled in French MUSIC.[45] Italian music of the time works in almost the opposite fashion, as structural dissonances coalesce into prolonged upbeats that eventually find resolution in distant goals. To affix trills and mordents onto most Italian music is to cripple it, to hamper its flight. Trills occur (as one might expect) in preparation for cadence, where they serve to focus the energy and halt the momentum.
[43] See, for instance, the admonishments that the performer obey the composer's indications exactly in the preface of François Couperin's third volume of Piçces de clavecin : "Je suis toulours surpris (apres les soins que je me suis donné pour marquer les agrémens qui conviennent à mes Piéces, dont j'ay donné, à part, une explication assés intelligible dans une Méthode particuliere, connüe sous le titre de L'art de toucher le Clavecin) d'entendre des personnes qui les ont aprises sans s'y assujétir. C'est une négligence qui n'est pas pardonnable, d'autant qu'il n'est point arbitraire d'y mettre tels agrémens qu'on veut. Je déclare done que mes piéces doivent être exécutées comme je les ay marqueés: et qu'elles ne feront jamais une certain impression sur les personnes qui ont le goût vray, tant qu'on n'observera pas à la lettre, tout ce que J'y ay marqué, sans augmentation ni diminution" (François Couperin, Pièces de clavecin , ed. József Gát [London: Boosey & Hawkcs, 1970], 5).
[44] Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music , trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
[45] Franko, Dance as Text , 26: "The ideological impulse behind geometrical dance could only achieve a partial colonization of space by the verbal/figural text. The human action needed to produce the figure could not itself submit to figurality. Thus, the monarch's control of geometrical dance was, of necessity, partial and incomplete."
Significantly, Marais's motion is always under the cautious control of a hand brake. Yet played by Jordi Savall, this tombeau proves profoundly moving, for Savall's subtle shadings, minute inflections, and physical gravity bestow on the music that exquisite blend of sorrow and stoic restraint so prized by French courtiers. Signs of grief abound, especially in the chromatic descent of the lament, but they are held in constant check through rhythmic tactics. The kind of motivic web that commonly grants the illusion of unity to the surface of a contemporaneous Italian piece is avoided, except for fragmentary reiterations of the lament emblem and the dotted rhythmic cell. For motives would pull the ear above the surface, encouraging it to make long-term connections of larger groupings (which would lead, as d'Alembert warns, to the collapse of the state ...).
Marais produces an affect of bittersweet resignation in this tombeau, in part by focusing on two versions of the sixth scale degree (ex. 4.4). In m. 2, for instance, the viol pushes down to c#, which seems to convey a ray of hope until the line moves on to c#, then drops defeatedly to b. The bass takes over the lament figure now and dwells again on that same flickering sixth degree that offers, then withdraws, hope. Meanwhile, the viol seems to try to rise above the gloom, twice (mm. 3 and 5) pushing upward through the springboard of a dotted pattern. In m. 5, the line collapses down by a tritone; the second time it holds out its high note even past the chromatic descent in the bass, then concedes to a cadence on e, executed nonetheless with noble dignity.
A brief episode in G brings a modicum of relief—note especially the achingly prolonged f# in m. 9 that initiates the reorientation to the major mode. But the relief is short lived: sharp rhythmic impulses in m. 16 pull toward A minor, and a harsh cluster in m. 19 drives us back to V/e, at which point the lament recommences. Later in the tombeau, moments of too-poignant grief are balanced by brusque coups d'archet that prevent a descent into despondency.
In Tous les matins du monde , Marais hides under Ste -Colombe's shed to steal his ornaments—not the signs written in the score, but precisely this science of how to give every note its proper attack, sustain, and weight. Savall keeps the half note perfectly steady in keeping with the dance, yet he plays freely within the half note as a means of infusing the piece with what François Couperin called âme (soul). Couperin complained that foreigners played French music badly because they lacked sensitivity to the rhythmic details that allowed this subtle and supple quality of motion. Only if one invests in each half note as if it were a world in itself, yet at the same time keeps the bodily gestures of the dance moving, can the
Example 4.4
Marais, Tombeau pour M. de Ste-Colombe , mm. 1–28
tombeau breathe. And although the piece proceeds through its Italianate series of modulations, there are no streams of thwarted desire dammed up in anticipation of long-term resolution. Marais's constant lingering and draining of tensions keeps the attention riveted on the moment.
For the most part, this method of composing was idiosyncratic to France. Although certain aspects of French propriety were imported to the Italian courts, the propulsive drive of Italian musical procedures remained fundamental. Unruly passions may have been domesticated as they were contained within da capo formats, standardized tonality, and affective codes, but the point was to display turbulence successfully channeled by reason. By contrast, the French rarely tolerated ungrounded energy for more than a few seconds at a time. Yet if French style had limited impact on Italy, it was embraced and even institutionalized in parts of Germany and Prussia, where petty courts pumped themselves up in slavish imitation of Versailles. In some courts, the nobility spoke only French, disdaining German as barbaric. Thus, some of our most detailed accounts of French performance practices come to us from German sources, from those who wanted to be able to replicate authentic French models down to the last detail.[46]
Because we no longer have any stake in what rival procedures might have signified, we often trivialize differences as "mere style." But this does not hold true in literary studies. Court poets in Germany at the time had to master French and write within its codes, which guaranteed the qualities that constituted what was known as civilisation . When in the mid-eighteenth century a number of poets began writing in their despised native language, they sought to challenge civilisation (which restricted its effects to the surface of the body and its behaviors) with what they called Kultur : the cultivation and expression of inner resources and feelings that revealed the superiority of the sensitive German bourgeois over the shallow artificiality of Francophile nobles. As Norbert Elias has shown, the rise of Kultur produced the beginnings of German nationalist literatures, with Sturm und Drang and Romanticism identifiable as successive waves.[47]
J. S. Bach worked within contexts in which he was relatively free to appropriate whatever musical styles came his way. We know that he admired
[46] See, for instance, Cooper and Zsako, "Muffat's Observations"; and Johann Joachim Quantz, On Playing the Flute , trans. Edward R. Reilly (New York: Schirmer Books, 1966).
[47] Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process , vol. 1: The History of Manners , trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), pt. 1.
Example. 4.5
Bach, Partita in D Major, Courante, mm. 1–16
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(example continued from previous page)
Example 4.5
(continued)
the Italian opera performed in Dresden and that he fell under the spell of Vivaldi's way of channeling musical energies. Beginning in the 1710s, propulsive tonality became his modus operandi, and he continually reread other genres (fugues, chorale preludes, etc.) in terms of his adopted Italianate procedures. The same is true of the dozens of ostensibly French dances he wrote over the course of his career.
In many of his dances, it is possible to overlook the way the French and Italian aspects of his music chafe. In the D Major Partita for harpsichord, however, he enacts a collision between the two that resonates strongly with Elias's subverting of civilisation by the forces of Kultur (ex. 4.5). Despite the work's Versailles trappings, each movement enacts the disruption of French bon goût by means of Italian energy. Thus the opening movement is a French overture, yet the dotted section loses its marchlike quality in a sequence of suspensions that begins parsing the motion out in three-beat units, and the allegro that follows is nothing less than a Vivaldian concerto. Similarly, in the allemande, a serene opening gives way to streams of Italianate figuration, devolving into the tortured pathos of interiority.
It is in the courante, though, that French platonic order most suffers at the hands of surging Italianate desire. Each of the first two measures operates within the patterns long associated with this most complex of the French dance types. A bar in a courante may be grouped into three half notes or divided down the middle into two dotted halves, and in a ballroom situation the dancer would execute different steps depending on the placement of the accents.[48] As in many courantes, Bach's begins ambiguously: the opening gesture would seem to come to rest on beat 4, suggesting division of the bar into two equal halves. Yet the melodic ornament on beat 5 tilts the motion forward, even though equilibrium is reinstated on the following downbeat. The second measure repeats the first, with the materials in the two hands exchanged.
But already in bar 3 this ambiguity begins to seek some kind of continuation other than the dependable resolution on the downbeat—a resolution that would be necessary if the body were actually to dance this composition. Thus the right hand condenses its pattern and arrives a beat earlier than usual, while the bass compensates by moving to g halfway through. The melody divides the bar into three and the harmonic rhythm into halves, and even though consolidation occurs again on the downbeat, the internal jarring within the measures becomes quite uneasy.
After the cadence prepared for measure 5 is displaced by a melodic suspension that refuses to cooperate, Bach drops the pretense that this is a refined, courtly dance. Instead, he unleashes the motives that had been harnessed to the regulated alternation of tension and release, and once unleashed, they start straining forward. A running bass enters to propel the motion toward a possible cadence in m. 9. The action stops momentarily, although the absence of the bass on the downbeat also renders this would-be arrival unbalanced. As though making a bid to reinstate orderly conduct, the melody begins a sequence in bar 9. Yet sequences, even if they spell order within an Italian context, were regarded as suspicious by the French: since it is in the nature of sequences to point forward in time through megagroupings to a delayed, hence all-the-more-desired moment, it takes attention away from the here and now, from the discipline of repeated bodily motions. Not only does Bach's sequence create that kind of long-range yearning, but its accent groupings become irregular with respect to the courante's meter.
Again, we approach cadence—this time, the dominant. But a defiant
[48] See Wendy Hilton, "A Dance for Kings: The Seventeenth-Century French Courante," Early Music 5 (1977): 161–67.
d in the bass in m. 11 prevents the resolution, and the melody arrives on g disappointed, frustrated. Another sequence ensues, built from the opening motive replicating itself end to end. Here again, while the first two units of the sequence acknowledge the downbeat, both overshoot the goal, pulling ever upward. By m. 14, the meter is sacrificed to the exigencies of climax, and the melody cascades downward, heedless of downbeats. Suddenly Bach rearranges the accents so that an elegant hemiola touches us down at a cadence of m. 16 as though nothing could have been easier. But it requires merely taking the repeat to show how far we have traveled in a mere sixteen bars. The headlong hurtling of that concluding sequence suddenly has to revert to the etiquette of Versailles—something akin to stuffing a rampant genie back into its bottle.[49]
Although Bach obeys the letter of the conventional law by coming to repose on a dominant triad at halftime, he also problematizes that moment: the restless, narrative-impelled exuberance of Kultur abruptly backs off, granting us that guarantee of civilisation 's propriety. But it is not that Bach escapes social grounding in his courante. If he wreaks havoc on the dance, he does so by means of pitting it against another set of practices, another conception of the body.
This courante arises from the basic incompatibility of these two worlds and Bach's attempt at forging a coherent relationship: four times over the course of the dance he takes us from what he sets up as the static rigidity of the ancien régime to the impulsive desire for self-generation that stood as the ideal of the emergent German intelligentsia, showing step by step how emancipation feels. He implodes the aristocratic conventions so fetishized by the German upper classes, just as German bourgeois poets were to define themselves in opposition to French civilisation . In other words, Bach can be heard as participating in the important early stages of German national culture, where identity was enacted by taking the forms of court and infusing them with a new energy that disdained the strictures demanded by civilized manners.
Yet what is enacted in Bach's courante can be (and has been) read as
[49] Score: J. S. Bach, Erster Teil der Klavierübung , neue Ausgabe sämtlicher Werke, ed. Richard Douglas Jones, ser. 5, vol. 1 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1976), 62. Unfortunately, I have not been able to locate a recording that conceives of this courante as I do, for most performers play the piece rather mechanically, according to the meter. In a pinch, try Gustav Leonhardt, Les Six Partitas , Klavieriibung 1 (Harmonia Mundi 20315/17). When I have given this paper as a talk, I have performed the courante myself. My rationale for my evidently unusual reading of the piece is presented above. The blow-by-blow narrative style of this discussion is, incidentally, deliberate: it is designed to simulate in words what I perceive as the particularities of Italo-German procedures.
the triumph of spirit over body, in the way the kinetic groundedness of the first bars are made to seem fettered by the dance, while the continuation appears as free flight—or, as Ludwig Tieck says of German Romantic music, as "insatiate desire forever hieing forth and turning back into itself."[50] Terry Eagleton shows throughout The Ideology of the Aesthetic that German idealist aesthetics sought to transcend the material world, to escape in particular the body and its associations; yet he also argues that the body—by virtue of its centrality to human experience—remains as the foundational Repressed throughout the subsequent history of aesthetics.[51] To the very large extent that many classical musicians were shaped under their presumably universal criteria of idealist aesthetics, the middle-class German poets, philosophers, and composers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries succeeded in transmitting their horror of French customs and the body that still persists today, without our necessarily knowing why.
Consequently, those of us who know about courantes or sarabandes primarily through Bach's compositions with those labels know rather less about French dance than we assume. Indeed, our experience with Bach's anti-French dances may render us less receptive to the genuine article than we might be if we had had no contact at all with such dance types, for it can make us impatient with the particular qualities of physical motion and the affective restraint characteristic of cultural forms nurtured at Versailles.
Understanding the very different agendas of French and German composers of dance pieces requires that we give up any claim to the universality not only of music but also of bodies. Nevertheless, by observing carefully the ideological debates surrounding musical practices we can gain invaluable information—information available through no other medium—concerning the historicity of the body. At the same time, an understanding of ideologies surrounding the body can help musicians as we try to reconstitute from stale notation the gestural vitality of a previous era.
[50] Ludwig Tieck, quoted in Carl Dahlhaus, The Idea of Absolute Music , trans. Roger Lustig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 18.
[51] Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 21 and passim.