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The Baroque Concerto in Theory and Practice Author(s): Steven Zohn Source: The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Fall 2009), pp. 566-594 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jm.2009.26.4.566 . Accessed: 29/03/2013 05:52 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Musicology. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 193.144.2.35 on Fri, 29 Mar 2013 05:52:20 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: Baroque Concerto Jtor

The Baroque Concerto in Theory and PracticeAuthor(s): Steven ZohnSource: The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Fall 2009), pp. 566-594Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/jm.2009.26.4.566 .

Accessed: 29/03/2013 05:52

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheJournal of Musicology.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 193.144.2.35 on Fri, 29 Mar 2013 05:52:20 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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The Journal of Musicology, Vol. 26, Issue 4, pp. 566–594, ISSN 0277-9269, electronic ISSN 1533-8347. © 2010 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ jm.2009.26.4.566.

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ReVIew eSSAy

The Baroque Concerto in Theory and Practice

STeVeN ZOhN

T hose familiar with undergraduate survey

courses that cover eighteenth-century music have likely crossed paths with an archetypal diagram of ritornello form, held up as the support-ing framework not only for Vivaldi’s fast concerto movements but also for those by numerous other composers from Bach to Mozart. Though the diagram’s pleasing symmetries are typically enthroned in the course’s textbook, “R”s and “S”s hovering above Roman numerals in color-coded boxes, students carefully copy down the Vivaldian game plan as if it were a mathematical equation or anatomical drawing—for they will surely be asked to reproduce it on the next test. And despite the efforts of conscientious instructors to counter a nearly irresistible (some might say inevitable) tendency to over-simplify the concerto’s early history, students often come away believing that Vivaldi’s formal innovations, as crystallized in a supposedly representative movement or two, were universally adopted by his contemporaries; that his con-certos fully reflect the highly goal-directed, harmonic tonality that had recently replaced the old modal system; and that these works quickly became mainstays of the various orchestras then popping up across europe, as the novel texture of doubled members of the violin family pitted against a soloist captivated both composers and listeners.

Such formulations, although historically grounded, are called into question by three recent books that aim to set the record straight—or perhaps a bit more crooked—with respect to the baroque concerto. Simon McVeigh and Jehoash hirshberg’s The Italian Solo Concerto,

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1700–1760: Rhetorical Strategies and Style History (woodbridge: Boydell, 2004) dispels a number of misconceptions about the vast repertory of more than 800 solo concertos by Vivaldi and his Italian contempo-raries. If it does not quite deliver the comprehensive survey implied by its title—only first (fast) movements are considered, and primarily from a formalist perspective—this book engages its topic with an un-precedented degree of analytical rigor, greatly refining our view of how several generations of Italian composers approached ritornello form. McVeigh and hirshberg are perceptive critics of musical style, equally alert to personal idioms and geographical and chronological trends. Moreover, their impressive command of the material allows them to draw musical connections across the repertory. Instead of construct-ing a potentially misleading, inappropriately linear narrative of stylistic change in a body of music that on the whole cannot be dated precisely, they conduct statistical studies of individual composers’ concertos, grouping them into regional centers whenever possible. Supporting the many insightful analyses of individual movements are a wealth of musi-cal examples, statistical tables, and formal diagrams.

Richard Maunder’s The Scoring of Baroque Concertos (woodbridge: Boydell, 2004) treats the genre as a broadly european phenomenon within the traditional chronological framework of 1685–1750, offering a comprehensive overview of the repertory underpinned by an impressive knowledge of manuscript and printed sources. yet the book’s focus on proving the hypothesis that one-to-a-part performance was a nearly uni-versal practice during the early eighteenth century makes it both more and less than a traditional survey of the composers and styles associated with the baroque concerto. Maunder’s extensive discussions of scoring and occasional commentaries on musical style are divided into two chron-ological segments, each with chapters organized according to geography (1685–1725: Bologna, Venice, Rome, Germany and holland, england; 1725–50: Italy, Germany, The Low Countries and France, england). De-spite the book’s overarching concern with the question of how many and (in the case of bass lines) what type of string instruments were intended for particular concertos, readers primarily interested in the music itself will find much to stimulate them. The many musical examples are well chosen, although Boydell, as McVeigh and hirshberg, has uncomfortably crowded them into the main text.

In many respects, these two books are worthy successors to classic studies of the baroque concerto by Arnold Schering, hans engel, Ar-thur hutchings, and Pippa Drummond.1 Like their predecessors, they

1 Arnold Schering, Geschichte des Instrumentalkonzerts bis auf die Gegenwart (Leipzig: Breitkopf & härtel, 1905; 2nd ed., 1927); hans engel, Das Instrumentalkonzert (Leipzig:

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offer fresh perspectives on familiar music and point to unaccountably neglected composers and works. Maunder, for example, argues com-pellingly that Corelli’s Concerti grossi, op. 6, were composed not long before their publication in 1714—or at least that the evidence for their supposed existence as far back as the 1680s is inconclusive at best. he also provides a fascinating survey of the earliest concertos performed and published in england, along with tantalizing descriptions of Gio-vanni Mossi’s op. 4, Antonio Montanari’s op.1, and willem de Fesch’s opp. 2 and 3. McVeigh and hirshberg provide a valuable discussion of Giuseppe Valentini’s mature works; they allow Giuseppe Alberti to emerge from the shadow of Vivaldi and take his place as “one of the originators of ritornello form” (p. 229); and they single out more than a few interesting concertos by obscure figures (one piece by Angelo Ma-ria Scaccia is colorfully characterized by them as “a rhetorical argument in the subjunctive, offering diverse implications and delayed realiza-tions”; p. 260). They also call attention to a number of Bolognese con-certos that seem well worth reviving, including three works by Girolamo Nicolò Laurenti preserved in Dresden and a characteristic concerto by Gaetano Zavateri (“A tempesta di mare”). whether or not these two composers, along with Gaetano Maria Schiassi, really can be consid-ered to have “overthrown” a Bolognese concerto tradition, the authors do make a convincing case that local preferences ceded more than a little ground to Venetian influences. The Bolognese tradition itself, represented by Torelli and several of his contemporaries, is discussed at length by Maunder.2

Such attention to dimly lit corners of the repertory is especially welcome at a time when most recent work on the baroque concerto has concerned itself with canonical figures, notably J. S. Bach, handel, Telemann, and Vivaldi, wider surveys of the genre being limited for the most part to chapter-length overviews in handbook-style volumes.3

Breitkopf & härtel, 1932); Arthur hutchings, The Baroque Concerto (New york: w.w. Nor-ton, 1961; 3rd rev. ed., New york: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1979); Pippa Drummond, The German Concerto: Five Eighteenth-Century Studies (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New york: Oxford University Press, 1980).

2 For a more recent discussion of the early Bolognese concerto, see Gregory Bar-nett, Bolognese Instrumental Music, 1660–1710: Spiritual Comfort, Courtly Delight, and Com-mercial Triumph (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 293–360.

3 Among book-length studies devoted in whole or in part to the concertos of in-dividual baroque composers, see in particular wolfgang hirschmann, Studien zum Kon-zertschaffen von Georg Philipp Telemann, 2 vols. (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1986); Malcolm Boyd, Bach: The Brandenburg Concertos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Meike ten Brink, Die Flötenkonzerte von Johann Joachim Quantz: Untersuchungen zu ihrer Überlieferung und Form, 2 vols. (hildesheim: Olms, 1995); Michael Marissen, The Social and Religious Designs of J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); Laurence Dreyfus, Bach and the Patterns of Invention (Cambridge, MA: harvard University Press, 1996); Paul everett, Vivaldi: “The Four Seasons” and Other Concertos, op. 8 (Cambridge:

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But this is not to say that the musical idioms, contexts, and meanings of such name-brand concertos are by now adequately understood, as McVeigh and hirshberg’s revealing chapters on Vivaldi make abun-dantly clear. In this respect, Bella Brover-Lubovsky’s Tonal Space in the Music of Antonio Vivaldi (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008) offers a welcome perspective on the composer’s concertos by relating their tonal and harmonic language to that of his operas, sacred vocal music, sonatas, and other works. Starting from the premise that Viv-aldi’s tonal practices do not reflect an “unambiguously ‘mature tonal’” idiom (p. xv), she aims to connect his vocal and instrumental works to eighteenth-century theory, aesthetics, reception, and pedagogy while re-vealing both progressive and conservative tendencies in the composer’s handling of “tonal space.” To this end, she distributes fourteen brief chapters among four parts, the first (“Estro armonico”) filling in the his-torical and theoretical background to Vivaldi’s harmonic language, and the others examining different facets of this language (“Key and Mode,” “harmony and Syntax,” and “Tonal Structure”). Brover-Lubovsky’s ef-forts to contextualize Vivaldi’s works often widen the book’s focus to en-compass tonal practice in early eighteenth-century Italy, thereby leading to a deepened understanding of both a crucial aspect of Vivaldian style and a historical period in which modal principles were rapidly yielding to harmonic tonality.

To be sure, the three books reviewed here diverge sharply in terms of methodology and focus. But each substantially advances our

Cambridge University Press, 1996); Alfred Mann, Handel: The Orchestral Music: Orchestral Concertos, Organ Concertos, Water Music, Music for the Royal Fireworks (New york: Schirmer, 1996); Martin Geck and werner Breig, eds., Bachs Orchesterwerke, Bericht über das 1. Dort-munder Bach-Symposion 1996 (witten: Klangfarben, 1997); Cesare Fertonani, La musica strumentale di Antonio Vivaldi (Florence: Olschki, 1998); Siegbert Rampe and Dominik Sackmann, Bachs Orchestermusik: Entstehung, Klangwelt, Interpretation: Ein Handbuch (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2000); Jane R. Stevens, The Bach Family and the Keyboard Concerto: The Evolution of a Genre (warren, MI: harmonie Park Press, 2001); Federico Maria Sardelli, Vivaldi’s Music for Flute and Recorder, trans. Michael Talbot (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Gregory Butler, ed., Bach Perspectives, vol. 7: J.S. Bach’s Concerted Ensemble Music: The Concerto (Ur-bana: University of Illinois Press, 2008); and Steven Zohn, Music for a Mixed Taste: Style, Genre, and Meaning in Telemann’s Instrumental Works (New york: Oxford University Press, 2008). examples of chapter-length surveys include Michael Talbot, “The Italian Concerto in the Late Seventeenth and early eighteenth Centuries,” and David yearsley, “The Con-certo in Northern europe to ca. 1770,” both in The Cambridge Companion to the Concerto, ed. Simon P. Keefe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 35–52 and 53–69; Steven Zohn, “The Overture-Suite, Concerto grosso, Ripieno Concerto, and harmoni-emusik in the eighteenth Century,” and Simon McVeigh, “Concerto of the Individual,” both in The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music, ed. Simon P. Keefe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 556–82 and 583–613. See also the relevant chapters in Chappell white, From Vivaldi to Viotti: A History of the Early Classical Violin Concerto (Phila-delphia: Gordon and Breach, 1992), and Michael Thomas Roeder, A History of the Concerto (Portland: Amadeus Press, 1994).

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knowledge of the repertory while suggesting multiple directions for further research. Considered together, they provide a résumé of the is-sues attending on the (Italian) baroque (solo) concerto, including the genre’s boundaries, paths of dissemination and influence, analytical ap-proaches to formal and tonal designs, and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century performing practices.

Defining the Baroque Concerto

McVeigh and hirshberg aim to provide a “thick history” (p. 3) of the Italian solo concerto by examining an unprecedentedly large num-ber of works in printed and manuscript sources; by reconsidering the minor status of composers such as Giovanni Benedetto Platti, Carlo Tes-sarini, and Andrea Zani; and by ignoring the “artificial division” of the Baroque and Classical periods traditionally placed around 1750. (But is the authors’ termination point of 1760 any less arbitrary?) what counts as a solo concerto here is any “concerto” for one or two soloists and ac-companying strings with at least one fast movement in ritornello form; the entire repertory is listed in a useful appendix furnishing musical incipits for those works not found in existing thematic catalogs. Thus not considered are “group” concertos for three or more soloists (per-haps not very different from “double” concertos?), chamber concertos without accompanying strings, concerti grossi in the Corellian mold, or ripieno concertos lacking independent solo parts.

Of the twenty-nine composers responsible for the approximately 800 movements surveyed by McVeigh and hirshberg, Vivaldi accounts for nearly half the repertory (337 movements), followed by Tartini (104), Tessarini (42), Zani (37), Valentini (35), and Platti (24). Thus these six composers, comprising a fifth of the total, produced over two-thirds of the sample. At the opposite extreme are composers represented by a single opus containing six to twelve concertos (Bonporti, Brescianello, Locatelli, A. Marcello, Montanari, and Zavateri), and others who have left us six or fewer works transmitted in undated manuscripts (Brivio, Ghignone, B. Marcello, Perroni, G.B. Sammartini, Schiassi, G.L. Somis, and Vera-cini). Given the enormous size of this repertory, and the authors’ almost heroic efforts in surveying it, one hesitates to call attention to its incom-pleteness. But McVeigh and hirshberg volunteer a list of several notable figures whose works they have passed over owing to “pragmatic consid-erations” and the book’s “chronological and geographical structure” (p. 3): the Tartini student Paolo Tommaso Alberghi (1716–85); Francesco Maria Cattaneo (1698–58), violinist and eventual Konzertmeister at the Dresden court; Domenico Dall’Oglio (c. 1700–64), who spent much of his career at the Russian court; the Neapolitan composers Nicola

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Fiorenza (d. 1764) and Leonardo Leo (1694–1744), the latter known for his important cello concertos; Angelo Morigi (1725–1801), who served the Duke of Parma; Paulo Salurini (1709/20–80), active in Si-enna; and Gasparo Visconti (1683–in or after 1713), who worked in Cremona. Although few of these composers will be familiar to non-specialists, collectively they produced a substantial number of concertos (at least twenty-four survive by Alberghi and seventeen by Dall’Oglio), worked in locations not otherwise represented in the book, and further document the spread of the Italian solo concerto outside Italy.

As reasonable as their self-imposed limitations are—the biggest be-ing the exclusion of all second and third movements from their ana-lytical study—McVeigh and hirshberg’s labeling as Italian any concerto written by a composer born in Italy is not without its problems, for it is reasonable to ask whether a concerto is really “Italian” if it flowed from the pen of an expatriate composer who spent much of his working life north of the Alps. would not the musical and social conditions of the adopted country—especially works of locally born colleagues—have affected his musical choices? In the case of Giuseppe Antonio Bres-cianello, who left Italy for good in his mid-twenties and spent the last forty-three years of his life in Germany, McVeigh and hirshberg find that his “highly individual approach to the concerto and to ritornello form seems to refer outside Venice, perhaps to his Bolognese upbring-ing” (p. 197). But I suspect that Brescianello’s personal idiom, which includes a preference for “richness and variety of texture,” has more than a little to do with his exposure to German concertos during his decades of service at the württemberg court in Stuttgart. Similar con-siderations may apply to other Italians who spent considerable portions of their careers in foreign countries, including Locatelli, Perroni, Platti, G. B. Sammartini, and Veracini. One could argue, in fact, that the solo concerto as a genre had been sufficiently internationalized by the 1720s and that a composer’s Italian heritage was no guarantee of his works be-ing more identifiably “Italian” than those of the Germans, englishmen, or other nationalities with whom he associated. Thus Maunder consid-ers the concertos of Brescianello and Platti, together with those by eva-risto Felice Dall’Abaco (another transplanted Italian), alongside works written by native German composers.

In defining his repertory, Maunder appropriately calls attention to the lack of standard terminology during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries for works that we now recognize as concertos. yet by considering any piece “a concerto if it was so called by its composer” (p. 4), he errs on the side of inclusivity. Some of the early works he dis-cusses, for example Torelli’s Concerto da camera à due violini, e basso, op. 2 (Bologna, 1686) and Giuseppe Maria Iacchini’s Concerti per camera à

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violino, e violoncello solo, e nel fine due sonate à violoncello solo col basso, op. 3 (Modena, 1697), are simply sonatas going by a fashionably new name. Certain later works that also figure in the book adopt features of the concerto but clearly stand apart from the genre’s main development: Johann Christian Schickhardt’s VI Concerts, op. 19 for five recorders (Amsterdam, ca. 1715), Joseph Bodin de Boismortier’s VI Concerts pour 5 flûte-traversieres, op. 15 (Paris, 1727), and Georg Philipp Telemann’s Quadri (including two works called “Concerto”) for flute, violin, viola da gamba/cello, and continuo (hamburg, 1730).

Some or all of these last “concertos” might be described as Sonaten auf Concertenart, a term coined by Johann Adolph Scheibe in 1740 to describe sonatas that mimic concerto style. And they are representa-tive of a substantial body of sonatas (with and without concerto-like elements such as ritornello forms and the dominance of one part) that early eighteenth-century composers called “concerto.” Maunder neither discusses this repertory—which was apparently resistant to performance with orchestral doublings—nor attempts to locate the points at which composers drew the generic line between sonata and concerto, a topic addressed by several recent studies.4

The Baroque Concerto Dispers’d

One advantage to taking a broad view of the baroque concerto, as all the authors do to varying degrees, is that patterns of production, dissemi-nation, influence, and reception come more clearly into focus. In a chap-ter-length cultural history of the Italian concerto, McVeigh and hirsh berg thoughtfully touch on eighteenth-century conceptions of virtuosity, the careers of several famous violinist-composers in Italy and across the Alps, performance venues, patrons, and the dissemination of works through manuscript and printed sources. This admirable overview helps lay the groundwork for discussions of musical connections between various corners of the repertory; and not unexpectedly, Vivaldi’s concertos are treated as a hub from which the works of many other composers radiate like spokes. For example, McVeigh and hirshberg draw the titles of their

4 On the Sonate auf Concertenart and associated generic issues, see in particular Jeanne Swack, “On the Origins of the Sonate auf Concertenart,” Journal of the American Musi-cological Society 46, no. 3 (1993): 369–414; Laurence Dreyfus, Bach and the Patterns of Inven-tion,, chap. 4; Gregory G. Butler, “The Question of Genre in J.S. Bach’s Fourth Branden-burg Concerto,” in Bach Perspectives, vol. 4: The Music of J.S. Bach: Analysis and Interpretation, ed. David Schulenberg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 9–32; Steven Zohn, “The Sonate auf Concertenart and Conceptions of Genre in the Late Baroque,” Eighteenth-Century Music 1 (2004): 205–47 (revised in Zohn, Music for a Mixed Taste, chapter 6); and David Schulenberg, “The Sonate auf Concertenart : A Postmodern Invention?” in Bach Per-spectives, vol. 7: J.S. Bach’s Concerted Ensemble Music, 55–96.

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introduction (“To Think Musically”) and first chapter (“Order, Connec-tion, and Proportion”) from Johann Nikolaus Forkel’s famous claim that J.S. Bach learned “to think musically” by studying and transcribing Viv-aldi’s concertos, taking it for granted that the Italian “proved the most significant guide to Bach in his search for musical ‘order, connection, and proportion’” (p. 1). As confirmation of Forkel’s claim, they cite an influential essay by Christoph wolff.5 But if Vivaldi’s substantial impact on Bach is undeniable, several recent studies have complicated the pic-ture by revealing the role that concertos by Giuseppe Torelli and Tomaso Albinoni played in the development of Bach’s musical thinking during his weimar years.6 Thus a more critical stance toward Forkel’s discussion would have been welcome, not least because McVeigh and hirshberg are ideally positioned to separate fact from fiction when it comes to assessing the Italian concertos that so impressed the young Bach.7

In Italy, Vivaldi’s concertos appear to have cast a long shadow on the works of his colleagues—though perhaps not so long as traditionally assumed. McVeigh and hirshberg credit the Romans Mossi and Mon-tanari with having “renovated” the Corellian tradition with elements drawn from Venetian concertos. In one movement, Mossi suddenly abandons a progressive modulatory pattern, as if to catch himself before completing a Vivaldian ritornello form. Another movement commences with “an unmistakably Vivaldian unison motto” (p. 160), but then appears to offer a “commentary on style change” when it reverts to an older, fugal texture. And a third suggests “a deliberate rhetorical play with impli-cations that comments on Vivaldian ritornello form” (p. 161). These readings of Mossi’s stylistic eclecticism are enlightening, but I am not entirely persuaded that they reveal his anxiety of influence or purpose-ful criticism with respect to a Vivaldian norm.

5 Christoph wolff, “Vivaldi’s Compositional Art and the Process of ‘Musical Think-ing,’” in Nuovi Studi Vivaldiani, 2 vols., ed. Antonio Fanna and Giovanni Morelli (Flor-ence: Olschki, 1988), 1:1–17; repr. in wolff, Bach: Essays on His Life and Music (Cam-bridge, MA: harvard University Press, 1991), 72–83.

6 Jean-Claude Zehnder, “Giuseppe Torelli und Johann Sebastian Bach: Zu Bachs weimarer Konzertform,” Bach-Jahrbuch 77 (1991): 33–95; Gregory G. Butler, “J.S. Bach’s Reception of Tomaso Albinoni’s Mature Concertos,” in Bach Studies 2, ed. Daniel R. Melamed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 20–46; Robert hill, “Johann Sebastian Bach’s Toccata in G Major BwV 916/1: A Reception of Giuseppe Torelli’s Ritornello Concerto Form,” in Das Frühwerk Johann Sebastian Bachs: Kolloquium veranstaltet vom Institut für Musikwissenschaft der Universität Rostock 11.–13. September 1990, ed. Karl heller and hans Joachim Schulze (Cologne: Studio, 1995),162–75; and Richard D.P. Jones, The Creative Development of Johann Sebastian Bach, vol. 1: 1695–1717: Music to Delight the Spirit (New york: Oxford University Press, 2007), 140–53.

7 Cautious skepticism of Forkel’s claim has recently begun to surface in the Bach literature. See for example David Schulenberg, The Keyboard Music of J.S. Bach, 2nd ed. (New york: Routledge, 2006), 117–18; and Peter williams, J.S. Bach: A Life in Music (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 89–90.

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The centrality of Vivaldi’s concertos is again postulated in a chapter on Venice, where the works of Albinoni, the Marcello brothers, and Bonporti are characterized by McVeigh and hirshberg as stylistically ex-perimental and even “askew to the main development of the Venetian concerto” (p. 183)—that is, to Vivaldi’s works. In the case of Bonporti, his op. 11 concertos “explore unusual strategies,” requiring listeners “to hear these innovative procedures as commentaries on norms that were already (by the late 1720s) well established” (p. 186). As with the example of Mossi, this image of Bonporti wrenching his listeners out of their Vivaldian comfort zones by tinkering with and critiquing a sup-posed model leaves me slightly uneasy, for I wonder how well estab-lished these norms really were. Is one justified in speaking of a Venetian “main development” if a number of important native composers largely followed their own paths in the wake of the “Vivaldian revolution”?8 (Tessarini is the one Venetian whose style seems unapologetically Vival-dian, and McVeigh and hirshberg find his works to display many of the dramatic and rhetorical touches associated with the older composer.) That complex webs of dissemination and influence extended across the larger repertory of Italian concertos, not simply from the seminal figures of Vivaldi and Albinoni to their younger imitators, is suggested by the authors’ discussion of a Platti violin concerto closely modeled on one by the Vivaldi disciple d’Alai.

Beyond the example of Bach, Vivaldi’s impact on northern euro-pean composers was considerable. But Brover-Lubovsky offers some im-portant qualifications, showing that the few Italian and english writers to mention the composer (Marcello, North, Avison, Burney, and hawk-ins) tended to highlight his compositional defects and extravagances; the partly inaccurate and lukewarm estimations of hawkins and Bur-ney proved especially influential on early nineteenth-century writers. Although Vivaldi enjoyed a resurgence of popularity during the 1730s and 40s in France, there his star also faded rapidly after mid century. Only the Germans were “genuinely sympathetic to his music” (p. 15). Thus heinichen, Mattheson, walther, Scheibe, Quantz, and Riepel all mention Vivaldi in writings published between the 1710s and 50s; Ger-ber and Forkel extol him around the turn of the nineteenth century; and a “continuous Vivaldi tradition” (p. 18) in Germany is evidenced by the Dresden court music collection, the Breitkopf thematic catalog, and Aloys Fuchs’ nineteenth-century thematic catalog of over eighty

8 Later in the book, McVeigh and hirshberg stress that the Vivaldian model did not preclude originality on the parts of those Italian composers who followed him: “the con-cept of a unified Venetian school of concerto composers following in the wake of Vivaldi is something of a chimera. hardly any violinists were left untouched by the ‘Vivaldian revolution,’ yet it is striking how rarely they simply aped the master” (p. 199).

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works by the composer. Moreover, it was the Germans alone who dem-onstrated some appreciation of Vivaldi’s harmonic and tonal practices.

This sketch of the rise and fall of Vivaldi’s reputation is a sobering reminder of just how fleeting fame could be in the eighteenth cen-tury. And it probably overstates Vivaldi’s posthumous prominence in Germany, where interest seems to have waned significantly after about 1750. Manuscript and printed sources belonging to the Dresden court and offered for sale by the Breitkopf firm in Leipzig (which advertised only a handful of Vivaldi’s works in its thematic catalog, and none after 1766) could by themselves have kept only a faint Vivaldian flicker alive. whether the later activities of collectors such as Fuchs represent the continuation of an eighteenth-century Vivaldi cult or a newfangled anti-quarianism is open to question.

Analytical Approaches to the Baroque Concerto

It may be due to the lasting allure of Vivaldian ritornello form that most analytical discussions of baroque concertos tend to gravitate to-ward formal aspects of the music. Fast-movement structures are usually represented by tables or diagrams, the ever-present danger being that a particular movement’s individuality will be obscured by the sameness of analytical format, or that reductive description of a movement’s form will substitute for genuine insight. with respect to Bach’s concertos, Laurence Dreyfus and Jeanne Swack have recently introduced analyti-cal paradigms that modify or subvert traditional thinking on ritornello form, stressing the ways in which Bach adapted conventional proce-dures to his suit his own conceptions of invention and elaboration.9 Thanks to McVeigh/hirshberg and Brover-Lubovsky, we now have stud-ies that attempt something similar for the Italian concerto.

Among McVeigh and hirshberg’s central concerns is to decode musico-rhetorical arguments through performative analysis, “perfor-mative” being understood as “not a definitive route map for the lis-tener, but an indication of a possible way of listening” (p. 2). The active listening process they advocate entails relating new ideas to those al-ready heard, anticipating the ideas’ eventual elaboration as the move-ment progresses, and comparing the movement to other contemporary works (including, but not limited to, concertos). They further suggest that listeners tend to perceive musical arguments across three dimen-sions: the large (extending over a group of works such as an opus), the

9 Dreyfus, Bach and the Patterns of Invention, chaps. 2–4 and 7; Jeanne Swack, “Modu-lar Structure and the Recognition of Ritornello in Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos,” in Bach Perspectives, vol. 4: The Music of J.S. Bach: Analysis and Interpretation, ed. David Schulen-berg (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 33–53.

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middle (a single concerto with a fast-slow-fast movement succession), and the small (the “well articulated motives” that form the “main build-ing blocks of the ritornello movement, namely the periods”). Although the small dimension would seem most relevant for the book’s analytical purposes, McVeigh and hirshberg clarify that “the middle dimension implies an awareness of the unfolding of a tonal and thematic argu-ment across an entire movement” (p. 83).

As for the large dimension, the programmatic design of the first six concertos in Vivaldi’s Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’invenzione, op. 8 (including The Four Seasons) suggests to McVeigh and hirshberg the intriguing notion that concerto opuses “were sometimes intended to be performed as a full set in a musical soirée,” and that “the same may apply to sets that lay out a calculated succession of contrasting affects” (p. 82) such as Vivaldi’s opp. 6 and 9. however, these claims are unsup-ported by evidence indicating that Vivaldi or his contemporaries con-templated, much less participated in, such cyclic performances. But the possibility should not be dismissed entirely, for we know that groups of three or six instrumental works were sometimes performed at one sit-ting in Vienna and Mannheim during the 1770s and 80s.10 Moreover, Vivaldi’s practice of alternating major and minor keys in his instrumen-tal collections, noted by Brover-Lubovsky, could be understood to have performance-related implications. Brover-Lubovsky also finds Vivaldi thinking in cyclic terms on the level of the multi-movement work, as in the Violin Concerto in G minor, RV 317 (op. 12, no. 1), where the first movement’s unusual tonal sequence—i–III–iv–VI–v–i—is reproduced in the finale.11

Preliminary to their survey of Vivaldi’s formal strategies, McVeigh and hirshberg examine concertos from the crucial period of 1698–1716 through the lens of later practice. Thus Torelli’s ritornello forms often fail to coordinate texture and tonal structure, they lack a proper sense of proportion, and they maintain a high level of tonal flux that is incompatible with the construction of long movements. Albinoni’s early concertos, on the other hand, feature greater tonal stability but a

10 elaine Sisman, “Six of One: The Opus Concept in the eighteenth Century,” in The Century of Bach and Mozart: Perspectives on Historiography, Composition, Theory, and Perfor-mance, ed. Sean Gallagher and Thomas Forrest Kelly (Cambridge, MA: harvard Univer-sity Department of Music, 2008), 86–87. Sisman (94) imagines haydn’s set of six piano sonatas dedicated to Prince Nikolaus esterházy in 1776 (hob.XVI:21–26) to have been “designed for a single sitting.”

11 Beyond Vivaldi’s concertos, Brover-Lubovsky provides a lucid discussion of large-scale tonal planning in an elaborate soliloquy from the 1728 opera L’Atenaide, RV 702, a scene in which a dramatic progression of falling fifths and tonal associations with earlier moments in the opera demonstrate that the composer could on occasion enlist “tonality as a means of underpinning the plot” (273–74).

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weak sense of the drama engendered by regular solo-tutti alternations. And the fast-movement structures of the Roman Valentini, who was not unaffected by Venetian developments, idiosyncratically combine ritornello procedures with elements of fugue and binary form. Against this backdrop, the Vivaldi of the early cello concertos, L’estro armonico (op. 3), and La stravaganza (op. 4) assimilates and coordinates formal innovations of the Roman, Bolognese, and Venetian traditions while revealing “how a composer might fully exploit their dramatic and rhe-torical potential” (p. 79). In other words, Vivaldi did for the early eigh-teenth-century concerto what Corelli had done for the late seventeenth- century sonata.12

Much of McVeigh and hirshberg’s analytical discourse focuses on the tonal plans of individual movements, which generally follow one of two types of pattern: either the “pendulum,” in which there is at least one intermediate return to the tonic (Albinoni’s favored strategy), or the “circuit,” which avoids the tonic until a concluding “recapitulation” (preferred by Vivaldi). Pendulum tonal schemes, Brover-Lubovsky finds, occur in only about 10% of Vivaldi’s fast instrumental movements (a percentage roughly corresponding to that found in McVeigh and hirsh-berg’s sample of the solo concertos), and primarily in early works. Such schemes do not necessarily halt the sense of forward tonal progress, for Vivaldi’s efforts to pass quickly through the intermediate tonic strength-ens “tonal coherence and directionality” (p. 141). here we seem to enter a grey area between pendulum and circuit schemes, for the tonic may be restated as a chord rather than a tonal area, unsupported by thematic returns. In the first movement of the Violin Concerto in C, RV 188 (op. 7, no. 2), for example, a tonic triad appears in the middle of a long circle-of-fifths sequential pattern. This cameo appearance “bril-liantly illustrates Vivaldi’s preferred undermining of the tonic when em-ployed as an intermediate harmony linking distant key areas,” and the absence of thematic recall “should be interpreted as part of a deliberate policy to avoid the recurrence of the tonic, thus treating the movement as a continuous tonal process” (p. 142). Does one therefore count the return to tonic for a mere quarter-note’s duration as a structural event? Perhaps, as Brover-Lubovsky points to movements in which Vivaldi goes to great lengths to avoid a (root-position) tonic triad altogether. Thus Vivaldi, in contrast to many of his contemporaries, demonstrates “a distinct preference for goal-directed, through-composed tonal organi-zation, favoring a progressive attenuation of the intermediate tonic’s appearance, up to and including its complete avoidance” (p. 147).

12 See Peter Allsop, Arcangelo Corelli: New Orpheus of our Times (Oxford: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1999), chaps. 5–8.

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Any remaining shards of the myth that Vivaldi slavishly followed a standard operating procedure in his fast concerto movements are swept away by McVeigh and hirshberg in their discussion of the composer’s ritornello forms. Indeed, the next time I am tempted to present stu-dents with a model tonal scheme for Vivaldian ritornello form, I will recall McVeigh and hirshberg’s discovery of no fewer than ninety-eight different schemes; across the entire repertory of first movements in Italian solo concertos, they count a total of 200 possibilities. Perhaps the most enduring assumption about Vivaldian ritornello form is that modulations in the solos are always confirmed by tonally stable ritor-nellos. yet this condition occurs in only 41% of McVeigh and hirsh-berg’s sample; an equal percentage of movements limit modulations to solo episodes and to ritornellos in peripheral keys. In the remaining 18%, Vivaldi explores practically all other possible options, even (in two movements) restricting every modulation to the ritornellos.

As “an inherently hierarchical approach to musical thinking” (p. 24), Vivaldian ritornello form depends, in McVeigh and hirshberg’s view, on the interaction of texture (tutti-solo alternation), thematic content (the presence, absence, or variation of the ritornello’s motto), and duration. To underscore the tonal role played by each textural divi-sion in ritornello form, they devise numerous movement “timelines” in which the familiar “R” and “S” labels are modified. Tonic ritornellos framing movements become “R1” and “R4,” whereas central ritornellos or solos in the tonic are “RT” or “ST.” The first solo, which modulates to the secondary key, is “S1”; subsequent solos may be “S2” (in a sec-ondary key, modulating to a “peripheral” or non-secondary key), “S3” (moving to the tonic, or from one peripheral key to another), or “S4” (in the tonic). Similarly, non-tonic interior ritornellos are either “R2” (in a secondary key: V in major; III, v, or iv in minor) or “R3” (in a pe-ripheral key). Letters may be introduced to indicate finer gradations of function (for example, R3a–S3a–R3b–S3b–R3c indicates an alternation of ritornellos and solos in a series of peripheral keys). Although these labels still recognize textural contrast as the primary generator of struc-ture in ritornello form, tonal function is privileged in the frequently encountered R3–R4 formation, which would traditionally be analyzed as a single ritornello modulating from a peripheral key to the tonic. Naturally, not every element of this system appears in every movement: R2 and S2 are absent if no secondary key is established (more on this below), and R3 goes missing in the small minority of movements that never establish a peripheral key.

One might argue, with some justification, that this nomencla-ture largely duplicates information provided by the standard Roman-numeral analysis in each movement’s timeline. But it also assists the

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reader in apprehending the composer’s tonal strategy while facilitat-ing statistical comparison within and between repertories. McVeigh and hirshberg’s analytical approach proves most effective for the concertos of Vivaldi and his followers. Its limitations become most apparent in discussions of relatively early concertos by Torelli, Albinoni, Benedetto Marcello, and Valentini, where tonal instability or the lack of an obvi-ous secondary key force the authors to assign double or triple tonal functions to ritornellos—“R1 (R2)” and “R3 (RT)” for Torelli’s op. 6, no. 12; “R2–RT–R3a” in the case of Albinoni’s op. 2, no. 8—and no tonal functions at all to solo episodes. To a lesser degree, the same issue arises in concertos by Mossi and Montanari, Roman composers whose conception of ritornello form owes much to pre-Vivaldian models, and in the later concertos of Tartini.

A more serious reservation concerns the identification of a sec-ondary key, which McVeigh and hirshberg dictate must always be the dominant in major-mode movements. even when the dominant is sig-nificantly downplayed in a movement’s tonal scheme, it still retains its special status:

Obviously the first new key has the initial advantage of temporal prior-ity in the movement, yet it may be only briefly stressed; and a later pe-ripheral key area more strongly privileged by having its own stable ritornello and by motivic emphasis. . . . [In the Bassoon Concerto in G major, RV 492,] the dominant covers a mere 4% of the movement, whereas the submediant spans 14% and is further supported by a ritornello. Vivaldi could expect the listener to predict the dominant as the target of the first departure, not only on the basis of the initial modulation but also by calling on past experience. Instead, the sub-mediant is highlighted by a full ritornello and by long duration—making it not an alternative secondary degree but, on the contrary, creating a frustration of expectation (pp. 108–9).

Vivaldi made the dominant his first tonal target in 180 of 232 ma-jor-mode movements included in McVeigh and hirshberg’s sample. yet this leaves fifty-two movements, a substantial 22% of the total, in which other keys (mostly the submediant and mediant) are allowed this distinction; the dominant is frequently avoided altogether.13 (Brover-Lubovsky, examining a significantly larger sample, finds that a quarter of the opening and closing movements in Vivaldi’s major-key concertos avoid the dominant as a secondary key.) Are all of these movements really without a secondary key area, as McVeigh and hirshberg would have it, and does the frequent absence of the dominant engender as

13 In their table 5.9, the authors further note that sixty-five movements in both ma-jor and minor modes—or 19% of all Vivaldi movements studied—lack an R2 ritornello.

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much frustration on listeners’ parts as they suggest? Or was Vivaldi—and are his listeners—often content, as in minor-mode movements, to allow a key other than the dominant to assume secondary status?14 The de-emphasis, and even absence, of the dominant in many of Vivaldi’s works may, Brover-Lubovsky suggests, be explained by his “attraction to modal variability and his proclivity for transposing thematic and harmonic material freely between modally contrasted tonal levels” (p. 237). Meanwhile, the relatively high number of major-key concerto movements targeting the relative minor as the first tonal move (16%, as opposed to 13% in McVeigh and hirshberg’s sample) is possibly related to the emphasis on the submediant in seventeenth-century composi-tions in the Ionian mode.

Because the dominant, mediant, and subdominant were all options for the secondary key in minor-mode movements, the choice between them could be, in McVeigh and hirshberg’s formulation, “elevated to a matter of rhetorical argument” (p. 18). For example, in the Oboe Concerto in G Minor, op. 9, no. 8, Albinoni uses the pendulum tonal scheme to set up the relative major and dominant as equally viable op-tions for the secondary key. And the “rhetorical basis” for RV 317—the concerto mentioned above in which both outer movements follow the same unusual tonal trajectory—“is again the search for a secondary key, resulting in a constant state of flux” (p. 20). what is meant by such ap-peals to rhetoric (and to “rhetorical strategies,” as in the book’s title) is clarified in the following passage, where McVeigh and hirshberg distin-guish between

what we have considered the inherently rhetorical basis of the solo con-certo and the contrived efforts by German theorists—interestingly, never by Italians—to apply terminology derived from classical Greek and Latin rhetorical texts to contemporary music. . . . Rather than in-dulging in futile attempts to force musical analysis into a rigid rhetorical framework, we will instead work the other way around, resorting to rhe-torical concepts whenever they seem to contribute to our understand-ing of the unfolding of the ritornello movement (pp. 26 and 28).

Thus ritornello-form movements are frequently described by the authors as continuous musical arguments, just as any musical structure might be likened to a speech through a description of its Dispositio,

14 In my own listening to the Violin Concerto in e major, RV 254, analyzed by McVeigh and hirshberg as exemplifying “a significant alternative strategy” that com-pletely avoids the dominant (118–19), I had no difficulty in hearing C minor (vi) as the secondary key. One might also consider vi the secondary key in Bonporti’s Violin Con-certo in B, op. 11, no. 3 (table 8.10), and IV the secondary key in both Bonporti’s Violin Concerto in F, op. 11, no. 6 (table 8.11), and Zani’s Cello Concerto in A (table 12.2).

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understood in Johann Mattheson’s sense of a musical composition displaying “the neat ordering of all the parts . . . in the manner in which one contrives or delineates a building and makes a plan or de-sign in order to show where a room, a parlor, a chamber, etc., should be placed.”15 The concept of musical rhetoric is used in this loose way throughout the book, and it comes up most often in the context of a composer’s defying listener expectations or “searching” for a secondary key, as in Albinoni’s op. 9, no. 8 and Vivaldi’s RV 317.

whether or not a movement’s opening phrase, or motto, is present in a given ritornello is, for McVeigh and hirshberg, a crucial determi-nant of a movement’s tonal hierarchy. R2 is usually supported with the motto, “affording clear priority to the secondary key.” yet in the case of the Violin Concerto in C Minor, RV 196 (op. 4, no. 10), in which the relative major functions as the secondary key, the “postponement of the motto to R3 places the dominant on a higher hierarchical level” (p. 88). Perhaps not every listener will invest the return of the motto with so much structural weight, but the notion that the peripheral key can be elevated in importance above the secondary one suggests, once again, that the labels “secondary” and “peripheral” are not as flexible as one might wish. what seems undeniable, however, is that “the power of the motto’s demand to be reheard creates an expectation for the listener” (p. 91), and that this expectation is easily manipulated. Thus Vivaldi withholds the motto from his recapitulations (“the point where the tonic is first reasserted by a strong perfect cadence”; p. 141) as much as 31% of the time, an observation which suggests that the ab-sence of a movement’s opening idea is frequently more meaningful than its presence.

Also frequently surprising is the manner in which Vivaldi intro-duces a movement’s recapitulation. McVeigh and hirshberg show that he is equally likely to reestablish the tonic at the start of S4, the begin-ning of R4, or within a ritornello (R3–R4). And although he has a slight preference for combining the tonic with the motto, rather than with some other segment of the opening ritornello, only 19% of the time does he coordinate the tonic return with both the motto and a tutti texture. Rarer still are those instances (6% of the sample) in which a final modulatory episode (S3) leads to the concluding return of the tonic in a single ritornello (R4), which is of course how movements in Vivaldian ritornello form are often said to end. Instead, recapitulations usually consist of tonic complexes such as S4–R4 or R4a–S4–R4b. Nor does R4 usually repeat the opening ritornello intact and unaltered.

15 Johann Mattheson, Der vollkommene Capellmeister (hamburg: Christian herold, 1739; repr., Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1954), as translated by McVeigh and hirshberg (27).

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If hirshberg’s and McVeigh’s analyses tend to emphasize the pro-gressive aspects of Vivaldi’s formal and tonal practices, the composer’s more conservative tendencies emerge in Brover-Lubovsky’s book. her survey of eighteenth-century theoretical writings reveals how Italians “obstinately continued to conceive the arrangement of tonal space in terms of modes and the solmization system based on the mutations and dovetailing of Guidonian hexachords” (p. 24), even as contem-porary practice increasingly adopted the twenty-four major and minor keys. Vivaldi’s own brand of conservatism is reflected in a fondness for minor keys and an unusually extensive repertoire of fifteen different tonalities. In choosing keys, he was guided not only by the strengths and limitations of instruments, but also by affective associations. hence the frequent linking of e major with appeasing sentiments, D major with the stile tromba, B major with the stile brilliante, or F major with the pastoral style.The associations of other keys are more diffuse: G minor (Vivaldi’s favorite minor tonality) encompasses vengeance, horror, and despair; e major, in addition to being identified with the siciliana, helps generate increased tension at the ends of operatic acts; and e minor is connected not only with the stile cantabile but with motoric rhythms in a faster tempo. Vivaldi’s preference for C major, used so much that it resists identification with a single affect or style, is “one of his most personal compositional predilections” (p. 51). Further evidence of key symbolism is detected by Brover-Lubovsky in many of the characteris-tic concertos, and she surmises that Vivaldi’s concern with preserving the link between key and affect often prevented him from transpos-ing music in his self-borrowings—though I wonder if saving time and minimizing copying errors were more powerful incentives for avoiding transposition.

Vivaldi’s inconsistent use of so-called modal key signatures embod-ies, for Brover-Lubovsky, early eighteenth-century “instability with re-gard to the concept of tonal organization” (p. 71). In certain works, she perceives a correlation between key signature and overall tonal struc-ture, as when A is treated as a diatonic scale degree in the Violin Con-certo in e, RV 250. works in C minor, moreover, exhibit differences in melodic character, tempo, and metrical pulse depending on whether they have Dorian signatures of two flats or common-practice signatures of three flats. G Dorian arias are typically furious and pathetic, whereas those notated with two flats are slower and more lyrical. And a Dorian conception may be detected in several arias and concerto movements characterized by “tonal and modal ambiguity” (p. 79), “tonal elusive-ness,” an absence of “coherence and directionality” (p. 83), and un-usual modulations to the minor supertonic. These examples suggest an intriguing, and largely overlooked, link between notation, tonal

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structure, and musical style. McVeigh and hirshberg also consider the tonal implications of “modal” key signatures, finding that signatures of two flats for works in e major (RV 250 and 252) and C minor (RV 202) support sharpward tonal moves or “modally oriented tonal schemes” (pp. 116–17 and 122–23). But they are less persuasive than Brover-Lubovsky in establishing a connection between Vivaldi’s notational and tonal practices.16

Characteristic of what Brover-Lubovsky describes as Vivaldi’s “ex-treme aptitude for modal contrasts” (p. 94) are his frequent shifts from tonic or dominant major to parallel minor. Such “minorization,” al-ready evident in his first three opuses and reaching an early peak in the 1710s, often takes the form of a motive presented successively in major and minor, or the fleeting replacement of a major triad with its minor form. But the device may also be projected over longer stretches of mu-sic, as in the Larghetto solo episode of Autumn from The Four Seasons, and is applied frequently in minor-key works to the mediant, submedi-ant, and natural seventh degrees. Such “influxes of alien harmonies” (p. 111) have their root in the seventeenth-century practice of modal transposition, and it is Vivaldi who exploits the process most effectively during the eighteenth century. This type of modal mixture first ap-pears in theoretical writings during the 1750s and 60s, leading Brover-Lubovsky to posit that discussions by Riccati, Marpurg, and Riepel owe something to Vivaldi’s example.

One of the more original aspects of Brover-Lubovsky’s study is her attention to Vivaldi’s tonal language at the syntactic and topical levels. Thus she finds the devices of lament bass, sequence, pedal point, and perfect cadence are all used to effect a “plateau-like style of expansion” in which a tonal “moment of repose” (p. 151) is prolonged before giv-ing way to further modulation. Vivaldi tends to coordinate lament bass patterns with a mixture of ostinato and ritornello techniques, and to allow them to migrate to different tonal levels. his extensive use of the falling circle-of-fifths bass pattern, arguably “the most immediately rec-ognizable mark of his harmonic idiom” (p. 175) and a lightning rod for criticism in recent times, is restricted mainly to the minor mode. here he deploys an unusually large variety of treble realizations and disso-nant harmonizations; idiosyncratic, too, are his chromatically inflected patterns using a chain of secondary dominant sevenths. Pedal points are called into service by Vivaldi for signaling “sweet drowsiness” (p. 191) or the stile alla caccia, to ratchet up pre-cadential harmonic tension, and

16 Modal key signatures are found by McVeigh and hirshberg “to be of little har-monic consequence” (231–32) in the concertos of Alberti, but perhaps directly respon-sible for the rare appearance of ii and IV as tonal centers in a minor-mode concerto by G.B. Somis (279–80).

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(when on the dominant) to lend tonal instability to long solo episodes. Finally, in his concertos of the late 1710s and 20s, perfect cadences are often treated as rhetorical gestures—as with themes built from ca-dential fragments—rather than as means of syntactic articulation and structural resolution. The effect is an “emphatic definition of key” (p. 209) in accord with the galant style’s tendency toward more cadences with less structural importance. The impact of this practice on phrase structure, Brover-Lubovsky speculates, may have something to do with Forkel’s claim of how Vivaldi affected Bach’s “musical thinking.”

The Baroque Concerto in Performance

For all we have learned about eighteenth-century orchestral per-forming practices—details concerning size and balance, placement, seating, articulation, tuning and intonation, ornamentation, vibrato, re-hearsal, and leadership—we cannot in the vast majority of cases match the number of performers to specific works.17 That is, reconstructing an orchestra’s size from surviving rosters, payment records, eye-witness accounts, and the like does not necessarily tell us how many musicians typically participated in performing a given repertory of concertos, overture-suites, symphonies, or other types of music. even when we are fortunate to possess an abundance of performing parts, as in the case of Bach’s Leipzig cantatas and passions, the evidence is likely to be inter-preted in very different ways.18 Arguments usually turn on the number of available string players, whether one-to-a-part or orchestrally doubled (with the possibility of part-sharing often a contested issue).

Maunder’s main concern is to bring much needed clarity to the issue of how many instrumentalists played in the performance of con-certos before 1750. with considerable zeal, he prosecutes his case that original performance material “shows beyond reasonable doubt that—with a few well understood exceptions—concertos were normally played one-to-a-part until at least 1740. To perform one of them or-chestrally, therefore, would be as historically inaccurate as would be the use of multiple strings in a haydn quartet, or of a modern-style choir in a Bach cantata” (pp. 1–2). Never mind that many baroque con-certos were in fact performed orchestrally (and sometimes with their

17 each of these performance aspects is explored in John Spitzer and Neal Zaslaw, The Birth of the Orchestra: History of an Institution, 1650–1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), especially in chaps. 10–11.

18 See for example hans-Joachim Schulze, “Johann Sebastian Bach’s Orchestra: Some Unanswered Questions,” Early Music 17 (1989): 3–15; Joshua Rifkin, “More (and Less) on Bach’s Orchestra,” Performance Practice Review 4 (1991): 5–13; and Rifkin, “The Violins in Bach’s St. John Passion,” in Critica Musica: Essays in Honor of Paul Brainard, ed. John Knowles (Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach, 1996), 307–32.

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composers’ blessings), for Maunder is out to shatter the modern ortho-doxy holding that the concertos of Bach, Telemann, Vivaldi, and their contemporaries were written for an orchestra of doubled strings—even one as modest as the ensemble of six violins, two violas, two cellos, and one double bass now favored by period-instrument ensembles.

Maunder is in large measure correct: manuscript copies of baroque concertos, and in particular those featuring a wind soloist, usually in-clude only single parts; and if exceptions are legion, they cumulatively prove the rule that one-to-a-part strings was the most common per-formance configuration (leaving aside, for the moment, the poten-tially complicating issue of part-sharing).19 I find that he overstates his case, though, in attempting to extract definitive scoring practices from printed sets of parts, which are by their nature more ambiguous sources of information than manuscripts. Published concertos were almost uni-versally issued with just one copy of each upper string part, not only to keep costs down, but also because both composers and publishers real-ized that many purchasers could muster only single strings. Thus the music was devised to make a good effect in one-to-a-part performances— an important though often overlooked point that Maunder does well to stress throughout the book.

But this does not mean that such works were playable only with the smallest possible ensemble, for it was simply prudent to compose and publish works in such a way that performance with doubled strings was practical, even if it required copying extra parts by hand, purchasing additional printed sets, sharing parts in performance, working out or fine-tuning alternations of solo and tutti in rehearsal, or some combi-nation of these measures. From Maunder’s perspective, orchestral per-formances of concertos were so rare that composers and publishers saw no need to take them into account. And yet by examining a vari-ety of internal and external evidence, he identifies at least fifteen con-certo publications that require doubled strings.20 In thirteen more, the

19 Among the most significant exceptions are the Dresden court repertory (dis-cussed below), and the many concertos in the Fonds Blancheton, a manuscript collection of instrumental music compiled during the 1730s or early 40s for the French parliamen-tarian Pierre Philbert de Blancheton, and which contains a duplicate second violin part for each work.

20 Francesco Venturini, Concerti di camera à 4. 5. 6. 7. 8 e 9 instromenti, op. 1 (Am-sterdam, 1713 or 1714); william Corbett, Le bizarie universali, op. 8 (London, ca. 1728); Telemann, Musique de table (hamburg, 1733); Tartini, VI Concerti a otto stromenti, op. 2 (Amsterdam, ca. 1734); Locatelli, Sei introduttioni teatrali e sei concerti, op. 4 (Amsterdam, 1735) and Sei concerti a quattro, op. 7 (Leiden, 1741); Jean-Marie Leclair, [VI] Concerto, op. 7 (Paris, 1737; or at least Concerto 2); handel, Concerti grossi, op. 3 (or at least those movements with operatic origins), Six Grand Concertos for the Organ and Harpsichord, op. 4 (London, 1738), and Twelve Grand Concertos for Violins &c. in Seven Parts, op. 6 (London, 1740); willem de Fesch, VIII Concerto’s in seven parts, op. 10 (London, 1741); Francesco

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composer himself explicitly allows or recommends the doubling of ripi-eno string parts on the title page or in a preface:21

Giuseppe Torelli, Sinfonie à tre e concerti à quattro, op. 5 (Bologna, 1692): “Please use more than one instrument for each part if you wish to realize my intentions”; Concerti musicali à quattro, op. 6 (Amsterdam and Augsburg, 1698): parts “should be duplicated or played by three or four instruments”; Concerti grossi, op. 8 (Bologna, 1709): “Multiply the other rinforzo instruments.”

Giovanni Lorenzo Gregori, Concerti grossi, op. 2 (Lucca, 1698): “So as not to increase the number of part-books, I have, as best I could, set down in the present work the concertino parts; however, those who play in the concerto grosso will kindly be diligent in keeping silent and counting (rests) where Soli occurs, and in re-entering promptly where Tutti is written, or they can copy the ripieno parts in those few places where this happens.”

Georg Muffat, Außerlesener mit Ernst- und Lust-gemengter Instrumental- Music (Passau, 1701): “If still more musicians are available, you may add to those parts already named the remaining ones, that is Violino 1., Violino 2., and Violone or Harpsichord of the Concerto Grosso (or large choir), and assign whatever number of musicians seems reasonable, with either one, two, or three players per part. . . . If, however, you have an even greater number of musicians at your disposal, you can increase the number of players per part for not only the first and sec-ond violins of the large choir (Concerto grosso), but also, with discre-tion, both the middle violas and the bass.”22

Giuseppe Valentini, Concerti grossi a quattro, e sei strumenti, op. 7 (Bolo-gna, 1710): “Double all the parts with as many as you like, save only for the concertino first violin, second violin, and cello. Moreover, so that you know which parts are to be doubled, you will see that the rele-vant part-books have titles in the plural, namely “Violini primi di Ripi-eno,” “Violini secondi di Ripieno,” and so forth.”

Francesco Manfredini, Concerti, op. 3 (Bologna, 1718): “The rinforzo parts can be doubled.”

Pietro Locatelli, Concerti grossi à quattro, è à cinque, op. 1 (2nd ed., Amsterdam, 1729): the four concerto grosso parts “may be doubled ad libitum”; L’Arte del Violino, op. 3 (Amsterdam, 1733): originally played by the composer with “a strong, unequalled, and very numer-ous orchestra.”

Barsanti, Concerti grossi, op. 3 (edinburgh, 1743); william Felton, Six Concertos for the Or-gan and Harpsichord, op. 1 (London, 1744); and the second editions of Francesco Gemini-ani, Concerti grossi, opp. 2 and 3 (London, 1757).

21 Unless otherwise noted, all of the following translations are Maunder’s.22 Translated in David K. wilson, Georg Muffat on Performance Practice: The Texts from

“Florilegium Primum, Florilegium Secundum,” and “Auserlesene Instrumentalmusik”: A New Trans-lation with Commentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 73.

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Alessandro Marcello, La Cetra (Augsburg, by 1738): “These concertos are arranged in such a way that they can be performed at any musical concert. To make their full effect, they need two oboes or transverse flutes, six violins, two violas, two cellos, one harpsichord, one violone, and one bassoon. . . . Although these concertos need all the above fif-teen instruments to make the full effect intended by the composer, one can nevertheless play them more readily (though less impres-sively) without the oboes or flutes, with just six violins, or even with a minimum of four, as well as just one principal cello, if you have no vio-las or second cello, and so on in proportion according to the number of instruments there may be at the concert.”

Pietro Castrucci, Concerti grossi, op. 3 (London, 1738), title page: . . . due altri Violini, Viola, e Basso di Concerto grosso da raddoppiarsi ad arbitrio.

John humphries, XII Concertos in Seven parts, op. 2 (London, 1740): ripieno parts “may be doubled at pleasure.”

Charles Avison, Six Concertos in seven parts, op. 3 (London, 1751): “The Chorus of other Instruments [i.e. the ripieno strings] should not ex-ceed the Number following, viz. six Primo, and four secondo Ripienos; four Ripieno Basses, and two Double Basses, and a Harpsicord. A lesser number of Instruments, near the same Proportion, will also have a proper effect, and may answer the Composer’s Intention; but more would probably destroy the just Contrast, which should always be kept up between the Chorus and Solo.”

Over the course of half a century, then, at least twenty-one Italian, German, French, and english composers made provisions for perfor-mance with doubled strings, for a total of twenty-eight published sets of concertos. were they mavericks in this respect, or was their flexible at-titude toward scoring representative of the mainstream during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries? And how large an orches-tra was expected in the absence of specific instructions? In the case of Torelli’s op. 5, Maunder understands the composer’s direction of “more than one instrument per part” to mean a maximum of three, based on manuscripts of other Torelli concertos in which there are one to three copies for each of the violin and viola parts. To demonstrate that no part-sharing occurred, he turns to still other manuscripts containing as many as thirty-eight string parts (four solo violins, ten ripieno violins, nine violas, five cellos, and ten violoni), apparently used for Bolog-nese festivals such as the feast of San Petronio, during which, as Anne Schnoebelen has estimated, only twenty-two to twenty-seven string play-ers were hired in 1663, 1687, and 1694. But all of these manuscripts are undated, and Schnoebelen also notes that between 1696 and 1756 the numbers of string instruments hired for the feast included 10–30

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violins, 6–18 violas, 4–9 violoncellos, and 3–12 violoni.23 For Maunder, however, such ambiguous evidence leads to the “inescapable” conclu-sion that “all string players were provided with individual copies of their own part” (p. 19). Be that as it may, there seems no reason to rule out performances of Torelli’s op. 5 concertos by festival-sized orchestras at Bologna.

Maunder proposes that other concertos demonstrably intended for orchestral performance require only a modest amount of string doubling. he calculates that the orchestra Telemann calls for in the Musique de table (1733) had a string configuration of 2–2–2–1–1 (with violins and violas sharing parts) because there is only one copy each of “Violino 1” and “Violino 2.” Locatelli, too, is found to require eight strings for L’Arte del Violino, op. 3. So much for the composer’s refer-ence, quoted above, to “a strong, unequalled, and very numerous or-chestra”! here Maunder recognizes that theoretically, at least, more players could have been accommodated by the copying of extra parts or the purchasing of more than one printed set: “but there is no evidence from surviving sources that this was ever done” (p. 202). Nor should we expect to find any, for libraries tend to separate prints and manuscripts, and few copies of the prints have survived.24

One could hardly wish for more straightforward advice on scoring from an eighteenth-century composer than that provided by Marcello in his La Cetra. was his preferred ensemble of eleven strings typical for Venetian concertos, including those by Albinoni and Vivaldi? Probably not, says Maunder, who dismisses Marcello’s collection as anomalous: “the idiosyncratic style, quite unlike that of Vivaldi’s or Albinoni’s con-certos, and the composer’s choice of an Augsburg publisher, may imply that the works were written with the German market in mind, and their scoring cannot be taken as evidence of a change in Venetian practice” (p. 160). The possibility that Marcello wrote his concertos for export (also raised by McVeigh and hirshberg) is intriguing, though it hardly explains why the composer would pitch doubled strings to the Ger-mans, among whom (as Maunder argues) one-to-a-part performance was the norm.

23 Anne Schnoebelen, “Performance Practices at San Petronio in the Baroque,” Acta Musicologica 41 (1969): 43–44.

24 On the other hand, the subscription list for the Musique de table indicates that no fewer than eight copies of the collection were ordered by musicians at the Dresden court (six by Johann Georg Pisendel, and one apiece by Pantaleon hebenstreit and Johann Joachim Quantz), where an unusually large string ensemble was available. It is certainly possible that the extra prints were used for performances with heavily doubled strings, though only one copy is found in what remains of the court music collection at the Säch-sische Landesbibliothek–Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Dresden.

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In england, consistent Solo and Tutti markings in the 1757 second editions of Geminiani’s concertos signal doubled strings to Maunder, who finds their absence in the first editions revealing of a different conception of scoring: “That there are no such markings in the origi-nal 1732 version must mean that at that date they were unnecessary because it was taken for granted that all parts would be single” (p. 231). Or might the 1757 markings simply spell out a common performance convention that allowed for the ad libitum addition of ripienists? Al-though Maunder acknowledges the theatrical—and therefore almost certainly orchestral—performance of many handel concertos (but not the similar practice of playing concertos at the hamburg Opera), he still finds that a single violist sufficed for op. 6. For confirmation of this scoring, he turns to musical societies at Canterbury, Lincoln, and Salis-bury, which ordered single copies of the publication and “therefore still played these concertos one-to-a-part—unless the ripieno parts were shared” (p. 248), which of course they could have been.

Among Maunder’s criteria for determining the number of strings intended for a given concerto are Solo and Tutti markings, instrumen-tal designations, evidence of part-sharing, musical texture, and instru-mental balance. he is surely correct that Solo and Tutti markings in printed parts are often meant as warnings about textural changes in the music; exceptional, in his view, are cases in which these markings are meticulously and consistently supplied in all parts, and so may be instructions for doubling strings to drop out or start playing again (as in Geminiani’s concertos). his main argument against the orchestral conception of Vivaldi’s opp. 3 and 4, as with many other concertos, hinges on the absence of certain Tutti markings that would signal to the “extra” players when to reenter following the Solo markings (which are almost always supplied). To be sure, there is some potential for confu-sion if an ensemble of doubled strings sight-reads these works from the original prints. But it seems to me that in most instances the missing in-formation could easily be restored during a brief rehearsal. And in situ-ations such as the third movement of op. 4, no. 3 (Maunder’s ex. 3.11), where Solo at the beginning of an episode is not cancelled by Tutti at the start of the next ritornello, might the sensitive and experienced rip-ienist—alert to the kinds of rhetorical cues described by McVeigh and hirshberg—routinely understand when to come back in anyway?

In evaluating the wording of title pages and part titles, Maunder tends to assume that composers mean exactly what they say. Thus Bach’s “Tutti Violini e Viole” at the start of the First Brandenburg Concerto’s Poloinesse movement cannot indicate string doublings because “the list of the instruments at the start of this concerto explicitly says ‘2 Violini, una Viola’” (p. 108), as though Bach could not have been referring

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to parts rather than players. Similarly, when Gregori calls an optional ripieno part “un Ripieno del Primo Violino,” this must indicate a single player, for the use of the singular in a “Violino” part should be taken literally. Both interpretations will seem counterintuitive to anyone fa-miliar with the modern convention of “Violin 1” parts being doubled at will.25 In fact, Maunder finds this practice reflected in Valentini’s op. 7, where the composer allows performers to “double all the parts with as many as you like” and employs the plural in part titles (“Violini primi di Ripieno”), but writes “Violino” on each of the four violin partbooks to the eleventh concerto. “For once,” Maunder allows, “this terminology does not necessarily imply single players” (p. 69). Nevertheless, when the Amsterdam reprint changes the part titles to the singular form, this “strongly suggests one-to-a-part performance of even the ripieno parts” (p. 70)—despite the fact that for this concerto the reprint retains Val-entini’s original Solo and Tutti markings and direction to double the violins.

elaborating on the pros and cons of the part-sharing argument, Maunder notes in a discussion of performance customs at the Darm-stadt court that continuo parts were sometimes shared, but that “there is no evidence that manuscript violin parts were ever shared at this time” (p. 188). This may have been true for concertos, but at least a few overture-suites by Telemann were performed at Darmstadt with violin-ists and oboists sharing parts.26 Printed parts may have been shared more frequently: Maunder considers that separate parts for violin ripi-enists in Tartini’s op. 2 reflect the composer’s practice at the basilica of S. Antonio in Padua, where the orchestra included eight violins, four violists, two cellists, and two “violone” players, and at least some part-sharing seems to have occurred. And Locatelli is credited with being “something of a pioneer in publishing concertos whose ripieno parts are to be shared by two players in the modern fashion, Solo markings being instructions to partners to stop playing” (p. 221).

Additional negative evidence comes from the Dresden court, to which Maunder devotes considerable space in his two chapters on Ger-man concertos.27 At Dresden, concertos were often accompanied by a

25 This point is also made by Michael Talbot in his review of Maunder’s book (Music & Letters 86 [2005]: 288). See Maunder’s reply in Music & Letters 87 (2006): 508.

26 Zohn, Music for a Mixed Taste, 184–85.27 here, as throughout the book, Maunder’s control of the secondary literature is

admirable. But he appears to overlook Manfred Fechner’s important study, Studien zur Dresdner Überlieferung von Instrumentalkonzerten deutscher Komponisten des 18. Jahrhunderts: Die Dresdner Konzert-Manuskripte von Georg Philipp Telemann, Johann David Heinichen, Johann Georg Pisendel, Johann Friedrich Fasch, Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel, Johann Joachim Quantz und Johann Gottlieb Graun: Untersuchungen an den Quellen und thematischer Katalog, Dresdner Stu-dien zur Musikwissenschaft 2 (Laaber: Laaber-Verlag, 1999).

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string ensemble configured 3–3–2–2–1, “occasionally with one extra violin or double bass” (p. 198) but without part-sharing. Maunder’s principal evidence that each player read from his own part comes from a manuscript copy of Telemann’s Concerto in e Minor for two violins, TwV 52:e4, performed at the court between 1710 and 1711. here, uniquely in the Dresden collection, each part is labeled with a court musician’s name. It is certainly reasonable to conclude that no part-sharing occurred in this case; and in fact, rosters of court musicians from the period (not cited by Maunder) offer strong supporting evi-dence. however, during the 1720s and 30s the number of instrumen-talists employed at Dresden increased so much that if no part-sharing occurred, then only half of the hofkapelle’s players would have partici-pated either in concert performances of concertos and overture-suites or in liturgical performances of concerto, suite, and sonata movements in the Catholic court church.28

Many of Maunder’s determinations about scoring are based on his own notions of what constitutes good instrumental balance and whether a particular musical texture supports doubling. with respect to certain concertos in Mossi’s VI Concerti a 6 instromenti, op. 3 (Amster-dam, ca. 1719), he argues that single strings were intended, pointing out that the two solo violins cannot have been supported by more than a single cello during episodes, that the ripieno violins cannot have been more numerous than the solo violins when there are independent parts for all four, and that the ripieno violins would cause an imbalance with a single cello if doubled. In one of Michael Christian Festing’s Twelve Concerto’s In Seven Parts, op. 3 (London, 1734), a unison bassetto line for violins 1 and 2 supporting a pair of solo flutes “might be thought too heavy with four violins” (p. 234). And Dall’Abaco’s Concerti à più Is-trumenti, op. 6 (Amsterdam, ca. 1734), contains “many soloistic passages for violin 1, not marked Solo. . . so that part is for a single player; hence, surely, so also are violins 2 and 3” (p. 195). Maunder’s assumptions re-garding balance in Mossi’s and Festing’s concertos are, in my view, very much debatable; and his characterization of Dall’Abaco’s violin 1 part raises the problematic issue of where one draws the line between soloistic and orchestral writing (the passage quoted from op. 6, no. 1 does not strike me as having an especially soloistic violin part, and so could con-ceivably have been performed by multiple players). As is to be expected, not every concerto is susceptible to this type of analysis. when an ex-amination of Mossi’s [XII] Concerti, op. 4 (Amsterdam, 1727) fails to provide a definitive answer as to how many accompanying violins were expected, Maunder throws up his hands: “the corresponding obbligato

28 Zohn, Music for a Mixed Taste, 184–89.

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and concerto grosso parts are in unison with each other much of the time, and it makes relatively little difference whether the violin lines are consequently played by two or by more” (p. 145).

elsewhere, readers will have to decide whether to privilege Maun-der’s reconstructions of composers’ irrecoverable intentions over docu-mented eighteenth-century practice. For much of Telemann’s Concerto in G for two violins and strings, TwV 52:G2, “the six string parts are contrapuntally independent, so it is unlikely that Telemann intended any of them to be doubled” (p. 92), even though the composer’s close friend, Johann Georg Pisendel, performed the concerto at Dresden with multiple instruments on both of the ripieno violin lines. Likewise, one manuscript copy of Matthias Georg Monn’s cello concerto includes doublets for the violin parts: “on the whole, however, the texture sug-gests that Monn had single strings in mind for this concerto and the version with duplicates was copied later” (p. 197). Maunder supports this assertion with a musical example that as far as I can see proves nothing one way or the other.

A final case concerns bass-line scoring, a topic on which the book includes much enlightening commentary. Though concertos were heard in Berlin and Dresden with a 1–1–1–1–1 string ensemble (includ-ing a double bass at 16’ pitch), Maunder argues that J.S. Bach’s Leipzig collegium musicum used this scoring only for the harpsichord Con-certo in F, BwV 1057. Because the sources for the other harpsichord concertos, and for the violin concertos, do not mention a violone—aside from the harpsichord Concerto in A, BwV 1055, where the in-strument may have been at 8’ pitch—“it would certainly be wrong” to use a 16’ instrument in these works (p. 182). BwV 1057 is exceptional among the harpsichord concertos in that other works have brief pas-sages in which the bass line rises a fifth above the harpsichord’s left hand: “if a double bass played there it would be a fourth below the left hand and the harmony would be inverted” (p. 183). The example he gives is an excerpt from the harpsichord Concerto in D Minor, BwV 1052, in which such inversions would occur twice, each time for the duration of two eighth notes. I imagine that there are some players and listeners who might find these fleeting transgressions unaccept-able, but those like me who have only heard this concerto performed with a double bass and never flinched at the offending inversions must wonder whether Bach would have sent his double bassist home in order to avoid them. even if he did, are modern performers really wrong to follow the scoring of BwV 1057 (or standard practice of the Berlin and Dresden courts) and include a double bass anyway?

* * *

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how we perceive, teach, and perform baroque concertos should not remain unaffected by the new perspectives offered by Maunder, Brover-Lubovsky, and McVeigh/hirshberg. whether or not one agrees with all of Maunder’s conclusions, for instance, he has made it all but impossible to sustain an argument that the baroque concerto is inher-ently orchestral in nature. At the same time, in endeavoring to extract hard-and-fast answers from often inconclusive evidence, he replaces the current, one-size-fits-all approach (baroque concertos were intended for a chamber-orchestra-size ensemble) with another (they were designed for one-to-a-part performance). The truth, as a variety of eighteenth-century sources indicate, surely lies somewhere in the middle. histor-ically minded performers can join scholars and students in reading Maunder’s book for his informative and thought-provoking treatment of the subject. But if they then choose to perform baroque concertos with however many string players are available, they may at least capture the spirit of eighteenth-century practice.

A new picture also emerges with respect to Vivaldi’s tonal practices and their relationship to the theory and practice of his contemporaries. If the composer rose to fame largely on the basis of his own progressive tendencies, we can also appreciate, thanks to Brover-Lubovsky, the role that a more conservative adherence to modal principles played in the Vivaldian revolution. She concludes that the composer’s posthumous neglect “was not due to his extravagant individualism and stylistic aber-ration, as has been traditionally suggested, but was instead caused by national disparities in aesthetic judgments and diffusion of ideas within eighteenth-century western culture” (p. 281). In other words, Vivaldi became a victim of enlightenment fascination with progress and an at-tendant aesthetic marginalization of instrumental music.

Finally, the importance of McVeigh and hirshberg’s contribution to the study of the baroque concerto repertory is perhaps epitomized by a featured surprise in their summary remarks—or at least what would have been a surprise to me before reading their book—namely that the two models of Vivaldian ritornello form put forward in an influential study by walter Kolneder do not correspond to a single first movement in a repertory of 800 concertos.29 even when isolated from their accom-panying tutti-solo textural shifts, Kolneder’s archetypal tonal schemes (I–V–vi–I in major and i–III–v–i in minor) appear in only 20% and 10% of the sample, respectively.30 Other common assumptions about Vivaldian ritornello form, as proffered by Charles Rosen and Manfred

29 walter Kolneder, Die Solokonzertform bei Vivaldi (Strasbourg: P.h. heitz, 1961), 312.

30 however, the major-mode scheme is the most common one in concertos by Viv-aldi, Tessarini, and Tartini; and the minor-mode scheme is among Vivaldi’s favorites.

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Bukofzer—that the final tonic ritornello (R4) is usually a repeat of the first (R1), and that modulatory solos are inevitably surrounded by tonally stable ritornellos—may also now be discarded.31 As useful as such formal models once seemed, McVeigh and hirshberg rightfully consider them to obscure the “diversity of options” actually found in Vivaldi’s concertos and to encourage a type of listening in which one judges “all the many departures either unfavorably as stylistic aberra-tions or favorably as heroic acts of liberation” (p. 301). But are they correct that the decades-old studies by Kolneder, Rosen, and Bukofzer reflect current thinking about the Italian solo concerto? A glance at recent specialist studies of Vivaldi’s music and textbook-type surveys paints a less dire picture, one in which Vivaldian ritornello form tends to be represented as a more flexible formal construct than in previous generations.32

The flexible analytical model proposed by McVeigh and hirshberg differs from earlier formulations in stressing a set of guiding composi-tional principles rather than an unyielding mold for ritornello form; the intermingling of styles in place of a linear development proceeding from the Corellian concerto grosso through to the galant solo concerto; and the concentration on local and individual approaches to the con-certo instead of compositional schools, all within a multilayered his-torical narrative accounting for processes of exploration, selection, and elimination of formal strategies. This untidy model, as the book amply demonstrates, promotes a wealth of new insights relating to the Italian concerto, and so it is to be hoped that future researchers will take up McVeigh and hirshberg’s challenge and adapt it to other repertories.

Temple University

31 Charles Rosen, Sonata Forms, rev. ed. (New york: w.w. Norton, 1988), 72; Man-fred Bukofzer, Music in the Baroque Era (New york: w.w. Norton, 1947), 228.

32 Perpetuating a traditional view of Vivaldian ritornello form are Karl heller, An-tonio Vivaldi: The Red Priest of Venice, trans. David Marinelli (Portland: Amadeus, 1997), 64; and John walter hill, Baroque Music: Music in Western Europe, 1580–1750 (New york: w.w. Norton, 2005), 352. Adopting a more flexible view or refraining from offering any abstract model are Michael Talbot, Vivaldi (New york: Schirmer, 1993), 110–12; Paul everett, Vivaldi: “The Four Seasons” and Other Concertos, 26–49; David Schulenberg, Music of the Baroque (New york: Oxford University Press, 2001), 296–301; and George J. Buelow, A History of Baroque Music (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 466–71. Talbot’s book marks a retreat from the more schematic view of Vivaldian ritornello form in his classic study “The Concerto Allegro in the early eighteenth Century,” Music & Letters 52 (1971): 12–14. Abstract models for Vivaldian ritornello form are also avoided in three recent surveys of western art music: Mark evan Bonds, A History of Music in Western Cul-ture, 3rd ed. (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice hall, 2010); J. Peter Burkholder, Donald J. Grout, and Claude Palisca, A History of Western Music, 8th ed. (New york: w.w. Norton, 2009); and Craig wright and Bryan Simms, Music in Western Civilization (Boston: Schirmer Cengage Learning, 2010).

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