In this first post I'd like to talk about Pierre Philidor's notation of ornaments and what this might mean. The ornament in question is the grace note leading up to the second quarternote in the third bar:
Seeing just the upper voice and that second bar, I'd think this is inégal. However, as this is french late baroque music, we would assume that inégal would be written in quavers like the fourth bar in the bass line. But if we can expect a regular inégal, why would Philidor then in the next system write the dotted figure seen in the upper voice first ...
In this last quote Mattheson's Der vollkommene Capellmeister, we go back to religion. There are just a few things that a good capellmeister cannot afford not to know:
"...to God even a thousand years is like the day which passed yesterday, and the angels' days are years, as is known by the theologians." Mattheson quotes Luther here from Daniel.
But let's return to the origin of music: "Angels, though they are spirits, can assume bodily for, can use instruments and appear in flesh and blood, as Michael did, as often as they want. And since in the hereafter we redeemed men like them will be in body and soul, it is easy to divine what a magnificent quality the harmony of these heavenly musicians must have had.
Thus it is not true that vocal music is actually and originally older than instrumental: for all ...
Here is yet another of my favourite quotes from Mattheson's Der vollkommene Capellmeister:
"Others, who think they know much more about [The Origin of Song] and who maintain no small reputation to this day, seem yet more wrong to me than the previous ones: since they, with Lucretious as their leader, made the unthinking bird the inventor of divine music. Hence, one of these may write that the first inventors of vocal music had been monkeys, because they aped this art from birds; in this however, in my opinion, the good man really acts quite apish. For anyone who has nothing sensible to say has no cause to abuse."
Hehe, I can just imagine the conversations Mattheson and Darwin would have had if they'd ever met.
