Hostname: page-component-6bf8c574d5-xtvcr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-02-17T03:50:23.325Z Has data issue: true hasContentIssue false

EVIDENCE OF THE PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF SOLFEGGIO PATTERNS IN THE MANUSCRIPT FOR THE 1707 NEAPOLITAN PERFORMANCE OF LA FEDE TRADITA E VENDICATA BY GASPARINI AND VIGNOLA

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2021

Extract

The last two decades have seen the opening of several new paths in eighteenth-century musicology, and Robert O. Gjerdingen has opened one of these: schema theory. Schemata are ‘stock musical phrases employed in conventional sequences’ that function as harmonic, melodic and rhythmic frameworks for musical passages. Evidence of such schematic thinking has emerged through related studies on partimento and solfeggio. Solfeggio practice of the time manifests a schematic way of thinking about music, being mostly based on simple hexachordal patterns which, as studies progressed, could be embellished in different ways. Vasili Byros has addressed the ‘archaeology’ of hearing through reception history, and offered strong evidence that eighteenth-century ears did hear schemata. Interweaving corpus studies on music of the long eighteenth century (1720–1840), contemporary music criticism and reception history, as well as didactic documents from that era, Byros sheds new light on the ways in which schemata were perceived at the time. A recent contribution by Gilad Rabinovitch uses a live improvisation in the style of Mozart by Robert Levin to demonstrate the importance of conventional schemata for historical improvisation.

Type
Essay
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

I would like to thank Dr Cesare Corsi and the staff of the Biblioteca del Conservatorio di Musica San Pietro a Majella, Naples, for having provided me with high-resolution images of the manuscript examples reproduced in this essay.