Music in Paris and at

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CHAPTER 36

• Music in Paris and at
• the Court of Versailles
• Instrumental Music

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• In seventeenth-century France, music for lute
  reached a zenith in the history of Baroque music.
  The Gaultier cousins in particular dominated lute
  playing in Parisian salons at mid-century. Two
  important developments took place at this time
• by 1630, the vogue of the ballet de cour had
  spread to the repertory for lute sets of dances
  were loosely organized in suites according to key
  and/or tuning
• new tunings emerged besides the standard one in
  fourths, and lower strings were added.

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• Tombeau an instrumental composition
  commemorating someone's death
• Style brisé literally "broken style," it denotes
  a discontinuous texture in which chords are
  broken apart and the notes enter one by one.

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• In the second half of the seventeenth century,
  the harpsichord replaced the lute as the chamber
  instrument of choice in France. The Couperin
  family, working at St. Gervais in Paris for
  nearly 175 years, was especially significant for
  the development of a repertory.
• Unmeasured prelude an opening piece popularized
  by Louis Couperin that is without bar lines and
  rhythmically free. By mid seventeenth century,
  composers had adopted the genre as an effective
  way to open their keyboard suites.

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François Couperin ("Le Grand")

• Surely the greatest of the Couperins, he served
  as organist at St. Gervais in Paris and as
  personal harpsichordist of the king. He wrote
  most of his chamber music for the royal court and
  taught the king's children and grandchildren.
• The Art of Playing the Harpsichord François
  Couperin's pedagogical manual for clavecin
  (French for "harpsichord") which provides a
  thorough discussion of fingering, ornamentation,
  and performance practice in general.

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• Agréments French for ornaments. Indicated by a
  variety of symbols rather than written out in
  full, agréments were to be realized by the
  performer. Couperin's The Art of Playing the
  Harpsichord is an especially invaluable resource
  for the performer of Baroque harpsichord music.

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• Notes inégales an unwritten performance
  technique in which a succession of equal notes
  moving rapidly up or down the scale is played
  unequally (for example, long-short).
• Overdotting an unwritten technique in which a
  dotted note is made longer than written, while
  the short note(s) that follows is shortened.

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• Ordre similarly to a suite, a group of pieces
  loosely associated by feeling and key. In his
  four collections of harpsichord music, Pièces de
  clavecin, Couperin organized his two hundred
  twenty pieces in ordres.
• Rondeau in the Baroque era a composition based
  on the alternation of a main theme (refrain) with
  subsidiary sections called couplets (ABACADA...A).