The Birth of Cello Virtuosity
(2025)
author(s): Antonio Pellegrino
published in: KC Research Portal
At the turn of the nineteenth century, cellists were trained to provide chordal continuo realisation for recitativi in various parts of Europe. In other words, when they accompanied an upper voice, players would create a harmonically rich texture to better support the line above them, filling in chords rather than playing single bass notes. My research aims to trace the origins of this practice, examining pedagogical materials from the Neapolitan conservatories at the end of the 1600s. First, we investigate sections of the Montecassino Manuscript MS 2-D-13 (1699), analysing cases when Neapolitan-trained cellists needed to conjure up music beyond the written bass line. Selected works by prominent cello virtuosi and pedagogues of the time (Rocco Greco, Gaetano Francone, and Francesco Supriani) help us grasp how the violoncello gained the possibility of playing sophisticated improvised lines upon a bass and even (dare we say) partimenti. The second part of my research takes us forward in time to the second half of the eighteenth century. We discover how Salvatore Lanzetti and Antonio Guida continued the pedagogical traditions established by the preceding generations of Maestri, crafting methods that trained cellists to employ the rule of the octave in order to get comfortable with chordal improvisation. Ultimately, these explorations aim to suggest how the ground may have been fertilized for the growth of the aforementioned recitativo practices in the late 1700s, treating chordal continuo realisation as a result of a dynamic process across generations rather than an isolated phenomenon.
Moving early music: Improvisation and the work-concept in seventeenth-century French keyboard performance
(last edited: 2023)
author(s): Mark Edwards
connected to: Academy of Creative and Performing Arts
This exposition is in progress and its share status is: visible to all.
At present, historically-informed performance (HIP) functions simultaneously as an established musical tradition and as a method for artistic inquiry and renewal. HIP’s capacity to effect change within artistic practice is, however, constrained by its own doxa. This study of Mark Edwards therefore asks the question: what kinds of new practices might have once been, and might still become possible without the influence of the work-concept? Using the keyboard music of Jacques Champion de Chambonnières as its central case study, this dissertation proposes understanding a piece’s fluid range of identities using the concept of mouvance, conceived as a kind of variance that arises within performances and is acknowledged by cultural participants (audiences and performers). Moreover, this study attempts to re-create this practice of mouvance by also re-creating the improvisational practice upon which mouvance relied. To that end, it adapts and extends existing research on historical improvisation (particularly studies of partimento) using techniques from computational musicology. It puts forward an “inductive” approach to style re-creation and improvisation pedagogy in which techniques and procedures are extrapolated from highly specific repertoires. Through mouvance, this study thus offers a new and historically-informed approach for applying the insight gained through improvisational practice to the creative performance of historical repertoires.