In this first post I’d like to talk about Pierre Philidor’s notation of ornaments and what this might mean. The ornament in question is the grace note leading up to the second quarternote in the third bar:

Seeing just the upper voice and that second bar, I’d think this is inégal. However, as this is french late baroque music, we would assume that inégal would be written in quavers like the fourth bar in the bass line. But if we can expect a regular inégal, why would Philidor then in the next system write the dotted figure seen in the upper voice first bar and bass second bar in the following example?

It seems like Philidor likes to play with the sharpness of the inégal. But if this is the case, we still haven’t decided what the second bar in the first excerpt means. My personal take on this is to see what Vivaldi is doing at the same time. Shame on me for thinking about italians when working with french music, but hey, Philidor and his fellow french composers were more influenced by italians than the previous generation composers would have allowed. Vivaldi uses such grace notes as dissonances in front of the harmonically correct notes, and since we know that they should have at least half the length of the note, they become great dissoances while it’s easy to read where we’re going harmonically. So I tried playing it lombardic, but I’m not sure that this would be a great solution either.

In this last quote Mattheson’s Der vollkommene Capellmeister, we go back to religion. There are just a few things that a good capellmeister cannot afford not to know:

“…to God even a thousand years is like the day which passed yesterday, and the angels’ days are years, as is known by the theologians.” Mattheson quotes Luther here from Daniel.

But let’s return to the origin of music: “Angels, though they are spirits, can assume bodily for, can use instruments and appear in flesh and blood, as Michael did, as often as they want. And since in the hereafter we redeemed men like them will be in body and soul, it is easy to divine what a magnificent quality the harmony of these heavenly musicians must have had.

Thus it is not true that vocal music is actually and originally older than instrumental: for all sort of instruments are also ascribed to the angels and saints in the Bible, especially harps and trombones, as string and brass instruments, and they certainly played just as well as they sange before Adam was created.”