Speaker
Description
When studying basso continuo practices as historical musicologists or theorists, we usually examine treatises and compare them with the music of ‘great’ composers in order to formulate analysis, reflect on creative processes, or to draw insights for performance practice. However, our knowledge of these practices remains tied to specific exemplary cases, with the risk of ‘incomplete’ reconstructions (Christensen, 2023), especially if we ask a few hero-musicians to narrate the story of entire socio-cultural context.
David R. M. Irving has recently pointed out the importance of exchange and circulation processes (‘Musical Transactions’) of practices and knowledge for a better understanding of eighteenth-century music (Irving, 2024). Yet transactions of accompaniment practices did not only take place between people operating in geographically distant cities (such as a cembalist working in Kiel and one in Badajoz), but also among musicians active in the same cultural environment but having different roles and social statuses within it. In Venice, for instance, basso continuo was used not only in what we now call ‘art music’, but also in many ‘popular’ musical events. The same phenomenon happened in other European countries in the Mediterranean area, such as Spain or France.
I will first consider the treatise L'Armonico pratico by Francesco Gasparini (Venice, 1708) alongside a series of short anonymous manuscripts teaching the basics of basso continuo practice. Secondly, I will compare compositions by Albinoni, Lotti, Vivaldi, the so-called ‘great masters’ with a collection of ‘popular’ canzonette ‘da battello’ (boat songs). In so doing I will demonstrate the widespread diffusion of certain harmonic models and their use at different levels of complexity, depending on the destinations of the music and the performative goals.
From this analysis, it will be evident that in Ancient Regime Venetian society these stylistic patterns represented a potential instrument of social aggregation: they were actually not only ‘transcultural models’ (La Via 2014), but even possibly ‘trans-social’ tools, i.e. capable of bringing together people belonging to a similar cultural milieu but to different social classes.
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