John Blow

Composers working in England during the period c.1675–c.1705 showed an ongoing fascination with the technique of ground bass, that is, a repeating bass pattern forming the basis of relatively extended pieces of music. This dissertation is the first comprehensive study of such ground-bass movements from the period in question. A particular focus of this dissertation is the research into harmonic and contrapuntal implications and possibilities – some of which can be inferred from contemporary treatises – and their realisation in the actual music, thereby shining a light on the creative processes used by late seventeenth-century composers and on the importance of improvisational techniques during this period.
The total number of vocal grounds incorporated into the discussion is 166, of which eighty are by Henry Purcell, while six are by Continental composers with no connection to England other than that their music was copied here. A similar overview is much more difficult to give for instrumental grounds, for several reasons: first, different sources of the same ‘piece’ often give such different ‘versions’ that these can hardly be called concordances, though it is not always straightforward to draw the line; second, instrumental music from the Continent ‘travelled’ much more widely than vocal music, not least because of the absence of (non-English) words and associated functional contexts (for example, liturgical); consequently, a much greater number of instrumental grounds from the Continent was copied or published in England, and some of the many anonymous instrumental grounds may also not have been written in England. In other words, despite the geographical focus of the study on England (in reality mainly London and, to a lesser extent, Oxford), music produced here cannot sensibly be studied in isolation. The appendices contain 97 entries for keyboard, representing at least that number of keyboard grounds and chaconnes/passacaglias, as well as 250 for other instruments.
Differences of approach can be discerned not just between different composers, but also between vocal and instrumental styles of writing, as well as different genres and intended functions of music. Instrumental grounds belong to one of two traditions – division grounds or chaconnes – with some pieces relating to both. Vocal music generally makes more use of reharmonisation and interesting phrase structure, or transposes the ground. Particular bass patterns such as the descending tetrachord can sometimes be linked with the text used. A more wideranging discussion of links between music and rhetoric in seventeenth-century writings also reveals a fundamental kinship of these two disciplines in Humanist thinking. Lastly, gradual changes in composers’ approaches to the composition of grounds can be understood in light of an increasing understanding of tonality as an important tool with which more large-scale forms and tonal contrasts could be created.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. ENNO POPPE – INTERZONE : LEADER UND BILDER – LIVE PERFORMANCE,CITÉ DE LA MUSIQUE, PARIS, DECEMBER 3, 2009
2. JOHANN STRAUSS – DIE FLEDERMAUS
3. JAN WILLEM DE VRIEND – EVA BUCHMANN – HANDEL – AGRIPPINA
4. ILDEBRANDO PIZZETTI – ASSASSINIO NELLA CATTEDRALE
5. PAUL MCCREESH – GABRIELI CONSORT – JEPHTE – JUDICIUM SALOMONIS – JONAS
6. SERGEY EISENSTEIN – SERGEY PROKOFIEV – IVAN THE TERRIBLE
7. JANACEK – BOULEZ – CHEREAU – FROM THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD
8. HANDEL – NIKOLAUS HARNONCOURT – JEPHTHA
9. HANDEL - JEPHTHA
10. HANDEL – ISAREL IN EGYPT
11. DELLER CONSORT – PURCELL – KING ARTHUR
12. ALBAN BERG – LULU – PIERRE BOULEZ
13. JEAN-CLAUDE MALGOIRE – PHIIPPE JAROUSSKY – FRIEDRICH HANDEL – AGRIPPINA
14. GEORG FRIEDRICH HANDEL – NICHOLAS MCGEGAN – JUDAS MACCABAEUS
15. VIVALDI – JUDITHA TRIUMPHANS
16. MOZART  LA FINTA GIARDINIERA
17. MOZART - MITHRIDATE
18. MENDELSSOHN – A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
19. MOZART – ASCANIO IN ALBA
20. MOZART – LA FINTA SEMPLICE
21. PIZZETTI – KARAJAN – MORD IN DER CATHEDRALE – 1998
22. CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI – L’INCORONARIONE DI POPPEA – GABRIEL GARRIDO
23. HERVÉ NIQUET – HENRY PURCELLE – KING ARTHUR
24. GABRIEL GARRIDO – MONTEVERDI – LA FAVOLA D’ORFEO
25. GEORG FRIEDRICH HANDEL – ARNOLD OSTMAN – AGRIPPINA
26. RICHARD STRAUSS – DER ROSENKAVALIER – PHILIPPE JORDAN – ANNE SCHWANEWLIMS
27. RICHARD STRAUSS – SALOME – SIR GEORG SOLTI
28. GIUSEPPE VERDI – RIGOLETTO STORY
29. RACHMANINOV – ALEKO
30. SHOSTAKOVICH – THE NOSE
31. CLAUDIO MONTEVERDI – IL RITORNO D’ULISSE IN PATRIA – GABRIEL GARRIDO – ENSEMBLE ELYMA
32. PHILIPPE JORDAN – DAVID MCVICAR – RICHARD STRAUSS – SALOME
33. VERDI – OTELLO – PLACIDO DOMINGO
34. JOHN BLOW – VENUS AND ADONIS
35. BENJAMIN BRITTEN – CURLEW RIVER
36. BENJAMIN BRITTEN – PETER GRIMES
37. BENJAMIN BRITTEN – PETER PEARS – BILLY BUDD

This article investigates occasional anthems written for the Chapel Royal by Henry Purcell, John Blow, and William Turner in an attempt to understand the political work enacted through their texts and settings. The anthem’s place in the liturgy and its relationship to the sermon is considered, along with the ways in which anthem texts were selected, compiled, and adapted from source texts. Though occasional anthems usually served to interpret current events favourably for the regime, during the crisis caused by James II’s prosecution of the Seven Bishops Blow set texts that can be interpreted as challenging the king’s pro-Catholic policies. The article concludes by considering the extent to which the characteristics of an anthem text can be used to speculate on the occasion for which it was selected when that occasion is unknown, using the example of Purcell’s My song shall be alway.

In the 1990s, Katherine Rohrer noted the prevalence of dance forms in Purcell’s vocal music, arguing that the dance chosen depended on the poetic metre of the text. Rohrer also observed that Purcell and his contemporaries employed local rhythmic effects for certain types of poetic line, but she described them as transcriptions of verbal stress into music, rather than theorising a set of stereotyped musical rhythms suited to specific types of poetry. In short, Rohrer offered a theory of large-scale English Baroque musico-poetics, but saw smaller-scale word-setting patterns as text-derived rather than musically systematic.

This paper expands upon Rohrer’s analysis, filtered through Robert O. Gjerdingen’s ‘schematic’ theory of eighteenth-century composition. It begins by examining three common, small-scale rhythmic devices, arguing that each was used exclusively to set a different type of poetic line. The unidiomatic accentuation that frequently resulted is further explained as part of the schemata’s aesthetic purpose. Following Grahame M. Boone’s and Lawrence Earp’s theories of medieval musico-poetics, I describe this as ‘recitational dissonance’, and argue that it offered the composer a means to produce musical variety while remaining recognisably faithful to poetic form.

The second part of the paper examines two frequently-used, large-scale formal types which encompass specific approaches to word repetition, melisma, and dance-derived structure. These too were used exclusively for specific poetic metres and stanza-forms. The paper suggests that poetic and musical form were far more closely connected than musicologists often suppose, and that schematic theory offers new insight into Baroque aesthetics and performance practice.

"This review-article examines the use of the augmented 6th by English Restoration composers, in the context of a review of Mark Ellis’s book A chord in time: the evolution of the augmented sixth from Monteverdi to Mahler (Farnham, 2010). Ellis’s terminology and stylistic observations are illustrated and tested, demonstrating that the augmented 6th was both prevalent and varied in Restoration usage. This evidence is applied to a specific editorial question concerning Jeremiah Clarke’s Come, come along for a dance and a song (Ode on the death of Henry Purcell), and to more general considerations of performance practice.