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    Jacquet de La Guerre Reading

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    lance

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    In 1704 Jacquet de La Guerre lost both her husband and her son, by ner denhal the hppoted eel eh peor erat wa Becongenet arcs began wa ice jogo sow be pha a by Alin-René Lesage. She sop ciety by establishing san Inher final years, she composed some shot airs and a choral Te Dum th, has been ost. Hers would qualify as a major area In the Realm of All the Senses: Two Sarabandes by Elisabeth Claude Jacquet de La Guerre Susan McClary ‘Music theorists usually restrict the senses used in the to the auditory and the visual. Although we work to deve four courses in ear ti would seem to have why we have such difficulty with repertories of seventeenth-century France This music often appears simplistic and banal to the eye and—ifitis mt ion du Tile, e Paras fons, tans. Susan MeClar (Paris: BC ‘10. ar: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Keyboard Music performed well—als tothe ea, and we tend to write off as unworthy of deled scrutiny. "et the problem resides not so much in the musi sel but in our ne lect of modes of communication that involve much more th tes: For French music ofthis period appeals to and by means of th the kinetic. the spatial, and pethaps even albeit through syest olfactory, all of which passthrough the filter of taste: that es trated by Francopiles. Qualities such as color and timbre usually pushed to the sid in the interest of objective analysis, become primary parameters in these repertores. This essay focuses on two works of Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de La Guerre: the sarabandes from her keyboard suites in A minor and D minor! My comments could apply equaly, however, to many other French composers of her era and of others as wel. Like other French composers of this time, Jacquet de La Guerre grounded much of her music in the social dance so central to life at court. I have written elsewhere about how this close allegiance to dance produced a kind of tem ite different from the musics of other focused the attention on a succession fering a sense of plenitude. This way corresponded not only with the physical actions ofthe dancing body but also with widespread ideological precepts in French philosophy, theology, and governance? It was within this ideological pe Rameau developed his freeze-frame approach is, whereby each vertical collection receives its own fan and Italianate musics of the seventeenth century worked to create forward striving trajectories by interrupting and delaying expected points of arrival, creating qualities of motion antithetical to those ofthe French. To the very large extent to which musicians today are trained inthe Italian fashion by way ofthe German composers who made i their ‘own, we often find it hard to locate the content of French dances. Even _musicologists who claim to specialize in this area sometimes apologize for the music's thinness. na volume dedicated to Jean-Baptiste Luly for in- stance, Paul Henry Lang wrote, ‘The music all these [French seventeenth-centuy] composers cultivated was in the sign of the dance, so congenial to the French, with its neat egnant rhythms, great surface attraction, andi tone and tach in harmony with the spirit of the age. This musi, though slight and short-breathed, was elegant and so different fom any ‘other thatthe whole of Europe became enamored ofit* iste clude acquet de La Gu, aabanesin& mina (65) m8 Diner (107) >=. its des Bander ob rs iui tae tits i o then acu buck othe guaranteed genes ugh Piseventeenth-centuty French court dance involved much ma a le Passe-pied At $ tee agate f him. Those wo excelled might receive his favor and bounty; those who did not ited {shment from court and financial ruin. The stakes were high, Completes in these dances occurred at several ut from ‘ach other in an arch form, and so on. The choreography of a single dance might demand a dozen such patterns, each one corresponding to a mee four or eight bars of music. See, for instance, this period notation fora mere eight bars ofa passepied (Figure Second, producing cross-rhythms with the steps thems Of these other factors that the king distinguished a si froma mediocre one, with all the rewards and demotior entailed. One could go through all the motions, in other words, and stil fil to execute an aesthetically pleasing result. ally, the qualities of motion for these dances depended almost iscule discrepancies of timing in the music—the kinds \we now might all groove but that can be measured only with the ad of modem digital technologies If in the words of William Butler Yeats, we cannot separate the music 0 either succeeds or fils in buoying up the festiviisin was the way the kids were dancing; they were Put we'd been one-beataccenters with 2 mn dah,” but here this was a thing that went veteeth- and Elgheenh-Century Keyboard Muse a —Cti—Ci il 14, Pari Seventeenth and Gightenth Century Keyboard Music ‘modal practice that I find it more productive to examine the ways she ‘expands on an age-old formula. For as far back as we have notated scores to tive major or even a plagal cadence that returns us to our starting position); the second strain reaches closure on the final. So automatic was this for two most common harmonizations of the iapente, or species of fifh from the fifth sale and further into the background by tain the points along the way a bref key thenker graphs, in part because Schenker [tens ere discerned this process fom the other end: through increasing stages of, duction, By contrat, my approach builds from the principal unit of modg, syntax, the descent through the modal diapente, and examines the meany by which seventeenth-century composers worked to expand and animate that pattem in their new practices?” I will begin with the sarabande from Jacquet de La Guerre's keyboar suite in A minor, a piece that seems quite transparent at first glance (ee Example 5.22 @). Its opening strain comprises a mere eight bars, which ‘break down into a + 2 + 4 measures. As is characteristic of the sarabande genre, each bar features a strong agogic accent on the second beat. And a. though we pass briefly through C major in mm. 3~4, we return to the tone in m. 5 and continue through a sealar descent to a half cadence pointing back toward A atthe bar line. If were introducing French dance types to a class, 1 could do worse than to use this sarabande as an example, so precisely does it satisfy the conventions of the style. Moreover, it could serve as an example for an into.

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