Notes inégales
The Notes inégales [ nɔt ineˈɡal ] French "unequal note values" is a name for the special type of rhythmic change of regularly successive short note values - a playing style that was particularly common in French music for keyboard instruments from the 16th to 18th centuries.
Definition
Literally, the term "Notes inégales" actually means "unequal notes", but this translation is very imprecise and gives little information about the essence and meaning of Jeu inégal . The execution of the Notes inégales when making music is carried out in such a way that if the note values belong together in pairs, the first, stressed note is lengthened in time, and the second, unstressed note is shortened accordingly, so that the temporal sum of both notes is retained (the reverse case , the shortening of the first note and the lengthening of the second note are called Lombard rhythm ). This way of playing does not result from the existing score, but is added by the performer himself; it serves to stimulate the playing of musical works from the mentioned era by giving a piece of music "more grace". This belongs to the type of practical performance conventions for the historical style area mentioned, which must be recognized by the performing player independently beforehand. Within this area this animation was determined by the factors expression, articulation , form of movement and time signature. This “unequalization” usually takes place with continuously shorter notes in lively, flowing movements.
With the time signatures 2/2, 3/4, 6/4, 9/4 and 12/4, the unequalized note values are the eighth notes, with the time signatures 4/4, 2/4, 3/8, 4/8, 6 / 8, 9/8 and 12/8 are the sixteenth notes and with the time signature 3/2 the quarter notes. The length ratio between the unequal note lengths was not precisely defined. The rhythmic "degree of sharpening" resulted from the affect of the music. There were the ratios 5: 3, 2: 1, 3: 1 up to 7: 1 (the latter a “double dotted line”) and other intermediate values. According to Louis Couperin , the following forms were also distinguished:
- détaché for uniform eighth note movement
- louré for a slight inégalité - like the ternary rhythm in jazz , and
- piqué for a sharp separation of the second eighth notes, like the familiar single-dotted notes.
The degree of Jeu inégal mainly depended on the character of the piece of music, but also to a large extent on the good taste ("bon goût") of the player. Under no circumstances should a rigid and schematic implementation come about. If the stylistic prerequisites were met, the application of the Notes inégales was self-evident; only in exceptional and doubtful cases was it specifically prescribed by the instruction "pointè" or a dotted notation. If, on the other hand, a uniform reproduction of a chain of note values was required, in contrast to the usual execution, the rule was "Notes égales ", or points of articulation or lines were placed over the notes.
Historical aspects
The evidence for the playing style of the Notes inégales comes mainly from France, first from Loys Bourgeois in 1550 in his work Le droict chemin de musique , then more frequently from the middle of the 17th century to the end of the 18th century. The Italian composer Girolamo Diruta (1561 - after 1610) gives an example of articulation in French music in his organ textbook Il transilvano in 1593 by calling "good grades" buona and marking them with the letter B while he describes the so-called Cattiva calls them “bad grades” and gives them the letter C. He does not explicitly use the term Inégalité, but his examples clearly describe an articulation that, precisely in the French sense, differentiates between longer (harder) and shorter (easier) note values.
François Couperin (1668–1733) wrote the following in his textbook L'art de toucher le claveçin from 1716: “Il ya selon moy dans notre facon d'ecrire la musique, des effauts qui se raportent à la manière d'ecrire notre langue. C'est que nous écrivons différement de ce que nous éxécutons […]. Par example: Nous pointons plusieurs croches de suite par degrésconjoints; et cependant nous les marquons égales ”, that is,“ In my opinion, there are errors in our music transcription which are justified in our speech transcription. That is because we note differently from our real execution [...], for example we play several eighth notes in steps as if they were dotted, and yet we record them as even ".
Inegalization was also a common practice in Spain, England and the Netherlands, but not in Italy. François Couperin writes in the above-mentioned treatise from 1716: "... the Italians write down their music as they intended it to be performed". In Germany, however, the typically French style of playing was known and used in the relevant compositions. In all of the well-known German textbooks of the time, for example, inequality is described in detail and clearly explained as the principle of the unequal pair of notes. Even Johann Sebastian Bach knows and used without doubt the Inegalisierung as an artistic style means so in Contrapunctus 6 in the Art of Fugue ( BWV 1080) entitled "In stylo francese". On the other hand, it was controversial for a long time whether the equalization should also be applied to Bach's works for keyboard instruments. Today the view has prevailed that it is possible in principle there, but by no means absolutely necessary.
Further examples can be found in publications by Johann Caspar Horn (1664) or in Georg Muffat (in Florilegium secundum , Passau 1698), and in many German writings up to the 18th century. Corresponding evidence can be found in Johann Gottfried Walther (1708), Johann Joachim Quantz (1752), Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach (1753), Georg Simon Löhlein (in the three editions of his clavier school 1765, 1779 and 1782) and finally in Daniel Thank God Turk . The latter writes the following about the application of Jeu inégal in his piano school (Leipzig / Halle 1789): “Particularly with dotted notes, both in terms of the division and the difficult or easy performance, a very different execution is necessary depending on the circumstances. It is customary to lengthen the dotted notes for the most part, and to shorten the immediately following notes by so much ”. At a later point in the same work, however, he weakens this statement and advocates a uniform style of interpretation ("that of several notes of equal length, each one gets its full duration"). Here it becomes apparent that the interpretation principle of the two-note inégalité weakens in the course of the Viennese classic and gradually gives way to elegant, virtuoso music-making. The appearance of Mälzel's metronome probably contributed to this change to a large extent. A quick and virtuoso and thus mostly uniform playing became in the 19th century the ideal of the interpretation and also the taste of the audience.
Literature (selection)
- E. Borrel: Contribution á l'interprétation de la musique française au 18 e siècle , Paris 1914
- E. Borrel: L'interprétation de la musique française de Lully à la Révolution , Paris 1934
- Eta Harich-Schneider: Small school of harpsichord playing , Kassel 1952
- R. Donington: The interpretation of Early Music , London 1963, expanded 1965
- F. Neumann: The French Inégales, Quantz, and Bach , in: Journal of the American Musicological Society No. 18, 1965
- S. Babitz: External Evidence and Uneven Notes , in: The Musical Quarterly No. 52, 1966
- J. Saint-Arroman: Les inégalités, l'interprétation de la musique française aux 17 e et 18 e siécles , published by E. Weber, Paris 1974
- F. Neumann: Ornamentation in Baroque and Post-Baroque Music, with Special Emphasis on JS Bach , Princeton / New Jersey 1978
- Eta Harich-Schneider: The "Notes inégales" , in: Melos No. 6, 1978, pages 512-515
- Ewald Kooiman: Inequality in Classical French Music , Utrecht 1988
- Manfred Harras: Jeu inégal , in: Musica No. 3, 1990, pages 156-159
- CA Fontijn: Quantz's unegal: Implications for the Performance of 18th-Century Music , in: Early Music No. 23, 1995, issue 1, pages 55-62
- J. Byrt: Writing the Unwritable , in: The Musical Times No. 138, 1997, pages 18-24.
swell
- ↑ Manfred H. Harras: Notes inégales , in: Ludwig Finscher (Hrsg.): The music in past and present , second edition, factual part, volume 7 (Mut - Que), Bärenreiter / Metzler, Kassel et al. 1997, ISBN 3-7618 -1108-X
- ↑ Marc Honegger, Günther Massenkeil : The Great Lexicon of Music , Volume 7, Herder, Freiburg im Breisgau 1982, ISBN 3-451-18057-X
- ↑ Schülerduden Musik, 4th edition, ISBN 978-3-411-05394-0 , pages 298-299
- ↑ L'art de toucher le clavecin , edited and translated into German by Anna Linde, English translation by Meanwy Roberts, Breitkopf & Härtel, Wiesbaden 1933/1961, page 23