Transcription
Hello again. Today I'm going to talk to you a little bit about the composer and violinist Arcangelo Corelli, and also about the Baroque genre of chamber music known as the trio sonata.
So the last lecture was an overview of the different genres of both vocal and instrumental music that we're going to be looking at in this unit on the Baroque. On the instrumental side, I'm going to begin with chamber music and with the type of piece called a sonata. And I'm really only doing that because it just so happens that the reading in the, in the Kenyon textbook, once we get through the section on opera and on Monteverdi and on Purcell, the very next thing we come to is the Baroque sonata. This is on page 127, and this is also where they talk about our conjugal Corelli.
So, as I said in the last lecture as I was giving the overview, a sonata is simply an instrumental work. It's a very generic term, sonata. Its generic meaning—it can be broadly applied. It's, it's actually—it has to do with the fact that in the old days when you were playing an instrument, no matter what instrument it was, in several different languages including Italian and also in English or in French, you would not use the word to play the instrument; you would say to sound or to sound on. So you would be sounding on the piano—well, not the piano, because it hadn't been invented yet—sounding on the keyboard, or sounding on the violin, sounding on the flute, whatever it is. That's simply the word that people used, the way we would use the word play. So a piece that was meant to be sounded rather than sung was a sonata, right? So the root, son, sonar, sonic—anything having to do with sound—that's the, that's the Latin root. Okay.
So there are many different types of sonata. And once that term, sonata, started to be used in the late 1500s, in the 1600s—remember the 1600s and the Baroque era in general is when we start to see the rise of instrumental music, when instrumental music becomes much more popular, much more prominent, much more utilized by composers of the time. So remember in the previous Renaissance or Middle Ages, serious composers didn't really bother much with instrumental music. So they weren't writing pieces that were meant to be played on an instrument; so they weren't writing sonatas. Sonata is a term that we see come into use with the rise of instrumental music beginning in the Baroque era, but it's a term that actually continues on to the present day. It's probably the single most common term for a piece of instrumental music. So guaranteed, all over the world today there are composers writing sonatas. It's not something that's exclusive to the Baroque. So we get to, for example, the, the, the next era after this one, the Classical era; you get to Beethoven. Beethoven composed 32 piano sonatas, and also violin sonatas, cello sonatas, right? So that the sonata is—it's a title that—a sonata in the Classical era might have a lot of differences with a sonata from the Baroque era, or a sonata from the Romantic era, or a contemporary sonata, but it's a, it's a title that has sort of been used over the centuries and has been very durable.
The Baroque Sonata is generally speaking a multi-movement piece. It will either have three or four movements generally. And these, these multi-movement pieces—remember what distinguishes one movement from another movement from another? They are analogous to chapters in a book. All right. So when we read a large work of literature, it's very often broken up into chapters, and each chapter has its own beginning and end. Something very similar in music is the idea of the movement within a larger multi-movement work. It's something you don't find in popular music. Popular music, for the most part, is sort of is structured in the, in the form of the song—a three or four-minute song. In fact, that word, song, is, is just ubiquitous, and people use it to describe types of pieces that are not really songs. That the word song means something fairly specific in the classical world. Not everything is a song; in fact, most classical compositions are not songs; they are something else—they are symphonies, or their concertos, or something else. Anyway, my point was in popular music we are not used to this concept of the multi-movement work. You listen to something on the radio, you hear a song, it's got a beginning and it's got an end, and that's it. Now that song might be off of an album which contains multiple songs, but even there we're not really thinking of the album as the structural unit. The album is sort of like a basket which contains many different songs, right? There are some exceptions to this. Back in the, in the 70s, for example, there was this, this fad of the concept album, and the concept album could be thought of as a big multi-movement work, something like Pink Floyd's *The Wall*, where we have different songs, but there's an overarching story that's told, and we can really look at that as one large structure, and each of the songs are sort of like different movements. That's maybe the closest thing that I can think of, at least within the world of pop music, that is analogous to the multi-movement composition in classical music.
All right. So in a sonata we generally have three or four different movements, and these different movements—the main thing that distinguishes one from the next is the different tempo. I've talked before, in, in the very first unit on the elements of music, how fundamentally important tempo is in music. Tempo, remember, is simply the speed of the beat, and it's, it's really the first thing that we perceive, the first thing that we take in when we listen to a piece of music is the tempo. Is it faster? Is it slow? If it's faster, it's—we might use words like upbeat. If it's slower, we might use words like mellow, or whatever. But think of how you would describe a piece of music to someone who had never heard it before. If you've just heard a new song that you really like and you didn't have your phone on you that you could just whip it up on YouTube and play it for your friend, how would you describe it to your friend? Probably the first kind of terms you would use would describe the tempo. You say, "Oh, it's, it's upbeat," or it's, you know, or it's mellow, it's laid-back, something like this. These are terms we use usually to describe the tempo. The tempo is the single most decisive element in determining the mood. There can be other, certainly other aspects of a piece of music which will affect the mood, but the tempo is the one that we perceive first and, as somehow, I think the most compelling.
So this is the way the composers in the Baroque era tried to achieve some emotional variety, some variety of mood. Because remember one of the basic aspects of the Baroque style that I talked about when I was just going over the elements of the Baroque style was that—and this is a sentence lifted right out of the book—a Baroque composition usually expresses one basic mood per movement, right? So if we have a multi-movement composition, each different movement will try to express one basic mood. We will not usually have a lot of variety of mood within a movement, but from one movement to the next movement to the next movement we will have variety of mood. That's how composers achieve some variety of mood by composing multi-movement pieces. If we have a work that is only a single-movement work, then we will probably have one basic mood throughout. There will be very subtle fluctuations in mood, but overall, you know, composers had this idea that if, if my main job as a composer, as a creative person, as an artist of any kind, is to get an emotional reaction from my listener, then what I really should do is focus on one particular emotion. If I want my listener to feel happy, then I should, I should have a piece of music that is happy throughout, from beginning to end. I shouldn't start off happy and then maybe have it be sort of sad in the middle and then go back to being happy, because then it's sort of like I'm mixing my messages around, pulling my punches. I want my listener to feel that ultimate joy of happiness, or the lowest depths of despair, or whatever it is, so I'm going to focus like a laser beam on one particular emotion. However, in a multi-movement composition, again that might be true for one movement, but then when that movement comes to an end and we have a moment of silence before we proceed to the next movement, that's where we have an opportunity for a change of mood.
Okay. So the sonata is a type of piece that can be for a solo instrument, and even there it's not as simple as it sounds, because we have solo instruments, but then we also have unaccompanied solo instruments. When we say solo, and I talked a little bit about this last time in the overview of the different genres, when we say solo in the Baroque era, it doesn't necessarily literally mean solo, like one performer by him or herself. It can mean that, and it probably will mean that in the case of certain instruments like the keyboard. The keyboard is sort of the most self-sufficient instrument because you can have the melody playing in one hand and some accompaniment playing in the other hand, or even with the feet if we're talking about the organ. So the, the keyboard is kind of self-sufficient. Other instruments, though, are not as self-sufficient. So, for example, the flute. The flute can only play one note at a time. So a flute sonata in the Baroque era isn't—although we might call it a sonata for solo flute—it's really for flute and keyboard accompaniment. There are certain instruments like the violin, for example. The violin is a little bit in between. There are some sonatas and other types of works like suites for violin which are truly solo and unaccompanied. So there's just—you would just have one violinist standing up there doing nothing and no one else. That's because the violin is capable of playing more than one note at a time. So the violin is a bit more flexible in that regard than, for example, an instrument like the flute. But then there are also violin sonatas that are accompanied, that are for violin where the violinist plays the melody for the most part, and a keyboardist will play the accompaniment. So for an instrument like the violin or the cello, for example, it could go either way. You could have solo accompanied sonatas, or you could have solo unaccompanied sonatas. In either case, they're considered solo; it's just a difference—do they have accompaniment? That is a keyboard supplying the bass line and the chords.
And then the type of solo and the type of sonata actually that we're going to look at today is the trio sonata. The trio sonata is a, is a type of chamber music. So chamber music is any type of instrumental music that is for a small group, where each performer—not—when I say small, how small? Well, it could be, you know, from anywhere from two to three or four up to, you know, sometimes even a dozen. But here's the thing in chamber music: first of all, is never any duplication of parts. I talked about this a little last time without a review, meaning in a chamber group each individual is playing their own unique set of notes; nobody is duplicating. This is unlike, for example, in an orchestra or in a band or in a big choir where you have multiple people duplicating each other's parts. So at, for example, in an orchestra you might have a dozen people playing first violin, another dozen playing second violin. In a big choir you might have a dozen people singing the soprano part, another dozen singing the alto part, a dozen singing tenor and a dozen singing bass, what-have-you. Not so in chamber music. In chamber music each individual player has their own unique notes. And another, another aspect of chamber music is it is generally not conducted. You don't have a conductor standing up there waving his arms around; it's, it's just not necessary when you have a small group. And instead the players just all kind of stay together by just maintaining eye contact, nodding to each other, and of course just listening and having rehearsed enough times—you don't necessarily need someone standing up there beating out time for you.
So a trio sonata is a, is one particular genre of chamber music. Chamber music again—any instrumental music for a small group. By the way, we call it chamber music because that's where it's best performed—in a chamber, meaning, you know, in a smaller room rather than in a concert hall. Ideally, if you go to a concert of chamber music, it should be in a fairly small room; it should not be in a big auditorium. So, for example, on the LHU campus, the room where we usually have our Intro to Music class is a perfect-sized room for chamber music. Price Auditorium is way too big for chamber music. That's a good-sized room for an orchestra or a band concert, but it's no good for chamber music. Remember, all of this music is strictly unplugged, unamplified, right? So it matters what size room we are in whether people are going to be heard or not.
Okay. So the trio sonata—here's another tricky thing about the trio sonata. It—you would think, "Oh, trio, there must be three of something in there." Well, mmm, yes and no. In a trio sonata there are three parts in the music. If you were to look at the score of a trio sonata, you would see three different layers going on simultaneously. The upper two layers would be two solo instruments of some kind, or two, let's say, melodic instruments like the violin, perhaps the flute or the oboe. Most commonly what you would have is a first violin part and a second violin part. Now there are two violins, but they're not playing the same notes. Usually the first violinist has the main melody; the second violinist would be harmonizing with that first violinist and usually doesn't have the main melody. That's where we get the expression, by the way, playing second fiddle. So you've got two melodic instruments, usually violins, and then the third part is the basso continuo. Remember what is basso continuo? It's the rhythm section of the Baroque era. What do I mean by rhythm section? Well, sort of like in a contemporary rock band, you've got a rhythm section; their job is not to provide melody or even to necessarily to stand out there that much; their role is to be the backbone, to provide rhythm, baseline, and chords. Very similar in the Baroque era, we have this thing called basso continuo. Now there is no drums in the basso continuo; in fact, percussion instruments generally were not a big thing yet in the Baroque era; that's, that's going to wait for a later era. So forget about drums, but we still have a bass line and we have chords that are accompanying the main melody or melodies that are over top of everything. There—most prominent—that's the basso continuo; their job is to supply the baseline and the chords. Now here's the thing that makes it tricky: the basso continuo requires two people in order to execute it. It's written in as only one part in the music, but you have two people looking at that part and executing it. One of them is likely to be a cellist. Remember the cello is the big string instrument that you hold between your knees and it looks like a giant violin—okay, big enough that you've got to hold it between your knees. The cellist is going to play the bass line; the keyboardist is going to play the bass line with their left hand, or maybe with their feet if it's an organ, but more likely it's going to be a harpsichord; they're going to play the bass line with their left hand and they're going to play chords with their right hand. So the basso continuo is considered one part because it's written in as one layer in the music, but it requires two people to execute. Therefore, you need four people to perform a trio sonata: two melodic instruments plus basso continuo. By the way, there's a—if you have a visual of what this looks like in the—let's see, it's page 128 in this section on Arcangelo Corelli and the trio sonata. At the top of page 128, there—it's just four measures of, actually the first four measures of the trio sonata—that's, that's part of your listening—you can see that we've got a violin, one violin, two, and then continuo, cello and organ. Okay. And what you're seeing there is figured bass. You're seeing notes and little numbers and little signs below the notes. The notes are the bass notes, and the cellist only has to worry about playing those notes; they don't have to worry about the little numbers and little symbols. The little numbers and symbols are for the keyboard player, and the keyboard player is looking at the notes and the numbers and symbols, and based on the combination of notes and numbers and symbols, a well-trained keyboard player knows exactly what chord to play, right? This is, this, this style of what I called a musical shorthand; it's an abbreviated system, a simplified system of notating music where you don't have to actually write in all the notes of the chords; all you have to do is use certain numbers or symbols or figures in combination with a bass note. That's what we call figured bass, right? So the keyboard player of the day had to learn, had to be well-trained in figured bass so that they could play something without having to have all the notes written out for them.
Okay. So I'm going to switch gears a little bit now. I'm going to talk about Arcangelo Corelli, because the example of the trio sonata that is in your text happens to be by Arcangelo Corelli. So I'm basically just going to give you maybe three important facts about Corelli. The book doesn't talk about him an awful lot, but I'm going to just stress the three main points. First of all, he is a mid-Baroque composer, born in 1653, right around the same time as Purcell, just a few years before Henry Purcell. He was the greatest violinist of his day; everyone pretty much agreed, you know, that that was it, really. His—this thing—he made a very successful career for himself, mostly based in Rome. He's born in Bologna, but spent most of his career in Rome playing concerts, either private, sort of house concerts or in concert halls for the upper crust of Roman society at the time. A lot of, for example, the hierarchy of the church—certain bishops and cardinals who were wealthy patrons of the arts, sort of like princes, basically princes of the church—and Corelli was a favorite of theirs. So first of all, the three main things, takeaways about Corelli: the greatest violinist of his time—his time being the mid-Baroque era. Number two: very influential as a teacher of violin. Corelli's students and his students' students went on to basically kind of invent or propagate, let's say, the modern technique of violin playing. Every violinist today kind of owes a certain debt to Corelli because he did more than anyone else to sort of solidify the approach to the instrument that has been used ever since. Invented many different types of techniques, different types of bowing, etc., and was hugely influential, so both as a performer and as a teacher. And then the third important point about Corelli, and maybe this is in a way the most significant in terms of trends in the Baroque era: Corelli was really the first big-name composer to forge a career for himself—a very successful career. Corelli was, was, was wealthy and famous, by the way. If you're ever in Rome, one thing that you absolutely must see in Rome is the Pantheon, which is this wonderful old Roman—it's, it's really the best surviving of any buildings in Rome from the time of the Roman Empire. It is the Pantheon; it's sort of a temple to all the gods, and it has its—the most famous dome in the whole world. It's just an amazing building. Just so happens that Corelli is buried in the Pantheon, along with Raphael, by the way—the artist Raphael, who we looked at one of his paintings last year. Raphael and Corelli are buried right next door to each other in the Pantheon, which is a tremendous honor. So it kind of shows what a big deal he was. You might not have heard of Corelli before taking this class, but he was a big deal in his day, and yet he never composed any vocal music at all. He made a hugely successful career for himself based strictly on instrumental composition. This is a major landmark in music history because remember in the Renaissance, in the medieval era, instrumental music was just a sideline that most serious composers didn't even bother with. So this reinforces a point that I made earlier that the Baroque era is really when instrumental music starts to take off, and as we go through the course of the Baroque it becomes more and more and more prominent; more and more composers devote special energy and attention to purely instrumental music. Corelli is sort of—it represents a, a milestone in that he is the first composer to not even bother with vocal music at all, and yet his career didn't suffer for it. He composed mainly sonatas—both solo sonatas and trio sonatas—and also concertos. Now the concerto is a type of piece that we will look at in the next lecture.
All right. So this particular trio sonata in your book, which is outlined on pages 127 and 128—if again, if you have the ninth brief edition, just find the p—the page that says the Baroque sonata on it, and they specifically go over a little bit the trio sonata in A minor, Op. 3, No. 10, composed in 1689 by Corelli. By the way, the opus number—see that Op. 3? What does that mean? The Op., by the way, stands for opus. Opus simply means work—same root as opera, by the way. Opera just means it's a work; it's an artwork; it's a musical work. What Op. 3 means is that this is Corelli's third published composition. We will start to see these opus numbers sometimes affixed to the titles of compositions, and all that means is, you know, Op. 10, Op. 50—that means that's the tenth or the 50th—50th published composition by any given composer. Not all composers have these opus numbers, but many of them do, and Corelli is one. So this particular trio sonata is a four-movement work. It begins with a fast movement and then has another fast movement, then a slower movement, and then finally a fast—but it's a four-movement work. And most trio sonatas were four-movement works, by the way. There are, there are two subcategories of trio sonata. There's not really that much difference between them, but I think the book mentions that there are two subcategories of trio sonata. There was something called the sonata da chiesa and the sonata da camera. The sonata da chiesa—the word chiesa in Italian means church—the church sonata, meaning it was an instrumental piece that was considered appropriate or suitable for performance in church. Now that by itself should raise an eyebrow because we've been talking all along during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance how you were not supposed to play instruments in church—in the Catholic Church certainly; you know, anywhere in Italy is going to be Catholic. I thought you weren't supposed to—I thought that was a rule—not supposed to play instruments in church. Well, this is a rule that is increasingly becoming—it's being ignored or stretched or broken, right? And this is again an indication of the sort of mania for instrumental music that existed in the Baroque era, to the degree that even in churches sometimes purely instrumental music would be played. Certainly organists, for example, would, would, would play preludes or toccatas before the church services, sort of a warm-up, as mood-setting type of piece. And we also see, for example, chamber music for strings being performed in church. So that's the sonata da chiesa. The sonata da camera—the word camera simply means chamber in Italian, I think. Well, a camera—isn't that something you take pictures with? Yeah, a camera is actually a chamber, which originally was just a little box that allowed light to go in through the lens and, and hit a piece of film, and you know, you'd expose the film to a certain amount of light. That the key component of the camera was simply the box that allowed a little bit of light in to hit that chemical film. Nowadays it's, it's done completely different, of course, but that's where the word camera comes from, because it's a little chamber, a little light-capturing chamber, right? So the sonata da camera is a chamber sonata, meaning a piece that is meant to be played in—let's…
Say a concert and maybe a private concert in someone's home, in a chamber, in a room, rather than in a church. Okay, so what's the difference, someone, if it's played in a church versus played in, and maybe someone's home, or in a concert in a chamber?
Really, the only difference is the sonata da camera would often have dance-like titles. There would be an element of dance. And that's not to say that people would get up and start dancing around; it's that the different movements of the sonata da camera would be dance-like. The movements of the sonata da camera would even have dance-like titles sometimes, a title that is specifically a certain type of dance, a certain type of dance step that has a certain meter, a certain tempo.
The sonata da Chiesa? Well, it was not considered appropriate to even think about dancing in church. You might have instrumental music, but dancing—that would go too far. So having this kind of dance-like type of music going on in church was not considered appropriate. So the sonata da Chiesa would not have these dance-like titles, or the music itself would not be suggestive of dance. That's really the only difference between a sonata da Chiesa and the sonata da camera.
All right, so this trio sonata by Corelli, we have just the first two movements in your listening. So maybe just after you watch this lecture, go and find those and click on it. And one thing I want to point out quickly, they say about the second movement. So we have two movements here. The second movement, it says here, the second movement, a vigorous Allegro—meaning it's fast in tempo; that's what Allegro basically means—is fugue-like, and also in quadruple meter. Fugue-like second movements were characteristic of Baroque trio sonatas.
Okay, what does that mean, fugue-like? Well, we haven't—we haven't looked at what the fugue is yet. We will in probably two lectures from now. So this book talks about this movement being fugue-like, like a fugue. Well, what does that mean, like a fugue? Well, a fugue is a polyphonic instrumental—usually instrumental—composition based on a main theme, which is called the subject. And in a fugue, we hear that subject first in one layer of melody all by itself, and then it enters in another layer, and then in another layer, so that the polyphonic texture kind of builds up gradually, one layer at a time. All right. And that's exactly what happens in the second movement of this sonata. We have this—this theme [Applause]—it appears first in the first violin, the highest pitch, and then we hear it appear as that first violin part continues on; we hear it appear in the second violin part, and then finally we hear it in the Basso continuo part as well. So that's that same theme, or subject, as it's known in a fugue, or in a fugue-like piece. That subject is heard first in one voice, then in another, then in another, depending on how many different voices, or how many different layers there are in the polyphonic texture. This will hopefully all make more sense when I get around to talking about the fugue in a future lecture, probably again two or three lectures from now. So for now, go and find in the saved videos or the liked videos the trio sonata by Arcangelo Corelli and listen to that. And next time we'll talk about another great Italian violinist, Antonio Vivaldi, and we'll listen to an example of a concerto by Vivaldi. See you then.