Posted with permission of the authors, from a FLUTE listserv posting.
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Date: Thu, 29 May 2008 16:08:08 +0100
From: rachelbrown.butterfield <rachelbrown.butterfield@VIRGIN.NET>
Subject: Handel e minor sonata
Dear Jenn,
A few thoughts, though expect I'll raise more questions than give answers. The subject of rhythmic alteration in 18th century music is tricky. Early Music scholarship has shifted on this one! A fashion for dotting to make everything match has, with many scholars and performers, changed to a literal reading of printed rhythms. I found Stephen Heffling's book Rhythmic Alteration in Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Music (Schirmer) helpful and unbiased, with evidence for and against, suggesting that there were different opinions in baroque times!
There are several strands to the question - here's just some
double-dotting a dotted quarter note so the following eighth note becomes a sixteenth (to match other 16ths)
making dotted rhythm match triplets as in 6/8
matching straight rhythms with otherwise dotted rhythms (as in Handel E minor).
The interesting thing with Handel is that he uses and reuses fragments of his own material time and time again throughout his works with no consistency. Anything could be different - the tempo marking, the rhythm, the articulation as well as the instrumentation.
The problem with the op.1 sonatas is that Handel had little or nothing to do with the publication. John Walsh published them in London, first, surreptitiously under the name of Roger of Amsterdam, because he didn't have permission, and later under his own name. The Roger set has some glaring mistakes, such as movements omitted, placed in the wrong sonata and even some violin sonatas which scholars are fairly sure are not by Handel. And I have two Walsh versions which aren't identical.
So in the case of the E minor Sonata op.1 no.1 there is no clear single source. Add to that the complication that the first movement appears in another E minor sonata (printed in the old Baerenreiter as op1 no.1a) and my husband assures me that the D minor version for violin (with yet more inconsistencies) predates anything published for flute.
I think you're free to do your own thing! I'd just add that even after you've decided on the rhythm, you could make it sound very different according to whether you emphasize the differences or treat them casually as light relief from monotony. Probably better to be guided by the mood, not just of the movement but of indiviual phrases. In a sombre movement like this you might find moments of passive resignation, noble pride, anguish, anger, bold determination, fear, a sweetness in affliction, etc, etc. A more active emotion might bring out a more stressed version of whatever rhythm you prefer. And you might feel it differently from one performance to another.
Incidentally, I've found it a fun way to teach rhetoric, to get students to play musical charades with emotions and my daughter loves doing it with even basic Italian words like Allegro, dolce, giocoso etc. It certainly produces some characterful playing!
Good luck with it!
Rachel Brown
Date: Thu, 29 May 2008 11:38:18 -0400
From: Daniel Pyle & Catherine Bull <danielspyle@BELLSOUTH.NET>
Subject: Re: Baroque style/Handel sonata
At 6:53 AM -0400 5/28/08, Jennifer Haley wrote:
> I have a rather specific question for you that has been bothering me for
> some time. In regard to Handel's Sonata in e minor, first movement, do you play the dotted
> sixteenth followed by the 32nd as is..... or in the style of Baroque, make the dotted 16th more of a double
> dotted 16th? I have heard it performed both ways. Thanks for your input!
Dear Jennifer et alia,
Double-dotting is not appropriate in this context. In fact, for the last 20 years there has been a growing consensus that double-dotting is very rare -- and especially not a part of the so-called "French Overture style."
The first issue in dealing with the dotted-16th's in the movement is tempo. The primary indicator of tempo is the time-signature, which is C, and that is modified by the mood-words Larghetto (in one version) or Grave (in the other) -- in both cases they are to be taken in 4 beats/measure and not 8. One should only sub-divide the beat if the mood-word is Adagio. "Grave" does not mean slow, but "heavy" -- meaning 4 beats to a measure but feeling heavy. Likewise, "Largo" does not mean slow, but "broad, or wide" (the way a river is broad or wide); "Larghetto" is "slightly wide."
It is virtually impossible to keep the movement in 4 (not 8) beats per measure, as Handel has indicated, and at the same time double-dot the 16th's.
As for the notion of double-dotting at all, for the most part it is a fiction created around 1900 by Arnold Dolmetsch and perpetuated by his disciple Robert Donington. It is based on a mis-translation of a French 17th-century text. It became further ingrained in the neo-Baroque movement when mid-20th century performers started grappling with the French-style overture-movements by Bach
and Telemann -- like the Telemann Suite in A minor and Fantasia in D, and the Bach B-minor Overture. The basic problem was, again, tempo: because they played (and many still do) the opening sections of these pieces at half-tempo, the only way that they could make the pieces sound with the rhythmic snap that they need, was to distort the rhythm by double-dotting and by changing 16th-notes to 32nd's.
But if you look at the scores for the Bach B-minor Overture, for example, you will see that it is in Common time and has *no* mood-word to modify it. That means that it should go at about quarter-note = 60. At that tempo, the rhythms all work just fine if you play them the way Bach wrote them.
One other perspective on the dotted-16th's in the Handel E-minor sonata. What is porbably going on here is that Handel has used dotted-notation to show the practice that French musicians called "notes inegales." As far back as 1500 and as late as the 1820's, many musicians played note-values that were 1/4 of the beat in length (or shorter) uneven, the same way that jazz-musicians do. The
practice survived longer in France than elsewhere, and may even have come to America through the French colony Louisiana and from there passed into American jazz idiom. (There is even a barrel-organ from Paris in the 1820's which plays the overture to Mozart's "Marriage of Figaro" in which the opening 16th-notes are built in to "swing" like a jazz-player.)
I think that Handel -- whose rhythmic notation is always full of problems and inconsistencies -- used dotted-16th's instead of straight 16th's to show that this movement should be played "inegales" -- which would mean that the ratio of 16th-notes to 32nd's would not be a strict 3+1, but more like 2+1. Remember all the grief we have all had from teachers about playing the dotted-rhythms as
strict 3+1? Well, here is a situation in which lazy dotted-notes are correct.
daniel & catherine
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Harmonie Universelle 303 Augusta Avenue SE
Catherine Bull, historical flutes Atlanta GA 30315-1403
Daniel Pyle, harpsichord & organ telephone 404-627-9077
Resident Director, Atlanta Baroque Orchestra
www.atlantabaroque.org
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