1650-1699 Solo Cello/Cello & Accompaniment

Question 1

Name 7 solo cello works ca.1650-1699.

Answer 1

1. Giovanni Battista degli Antonii: 12 Ricercate for unaccompanied violoncello (1687)
   2-4. Domenico Gabrielli
   
   • Sonata No.1 for cello and keyboard (1689)
   • Sonata No.2 for cello and keyboard (ca.1689)
   • 7 Ricercate sopra il Violoncello o cembalo (ca.1689)
2. Giuseppe Jacchini: 12 Sonate a Violoncello solo violin and cello ea per camera (1692)
3. Domenico Galli: 12 Trattenimento Musicale Sopra Il Violoncello A’ Solo (1692)
4. Antonio Bononcini: 12 Sonatas for violoncello and bass o continuo (ca.1690)

Question 2

Discuss the early development of the cello as an instrument.

Answer 2

• The name violoncello developed, from ‘violone,’ a large viola, and ‘cello’ an Italian word meaning small.
• One of the earliest depictions of a cello can be found in the fresco decorating the Saronno Cathedral, painted in 1535.
• The earliest surviving cello is the work of Andrea Amati, dated 1572. It was made as part of a group of instruments for Charles IX, King of France, and shows that the cello was established as a member of the violin family at a very early stage.
• The development of the cello as a distinctive and formally acknowledged instrument was inhibited by the practice, which continued well into the 17th century, of preferring the viol to the cello as the bass instrument in string ensembles. Viols experienced a very different development from violin-family instruments, having frets and a dramatically different shape, and often enjoyed a reputation of refinement and delicacy. It was capable of greater articulation than the early cello, which was considered to have rather clumsy tones.
• The cello benefited greatly from the late seventeenth-century invention of wire-wound strings which rendered an improved tone on smaller and more easily playable bass violins covering the same low register as larger versions did.
• Antonio Stradivari’s work with the cello around 1707 was one of the greatest achievements of his distinguished career. Early cellos largely follow a very bulbous form, with the back and front highly arched; this can provide a resonant bass, which was mostly all that was required of the cello in the 17th century. By flattening the arch, Stradivari increased the projection and focus of the sound on all four strings.
• The bow has a far longer history than the cello, but the instrument’s rapid development made new demands on the existing bows of the 16th century. The final form of the bow was determined by the great French craftsman François Tourte (1747-1835). Although it cannot be proved that he invented any of the individual features that define the modern bow, he was the first to employ them effectively. He refined the shape of the head, and equipped the ebony frog with the slide and ‘D-ring’ or ferrule to maintain the hair in a uniform ribbon. He also perfected the incurved shape of the stick to produce an ideal balance, weight, and spring in the pernambuco wood.

Question 3

Discuss the role of the cello in the earliest cello literature.

Answer 3

• In its early years, the cello had chiefly known an accompanying task in playing the bass voice or basso continuo (“following bass”). In those days, the instrument was generally larger than our present cello, and was tuned lower. In the history of the bass violin, the term ‘cello’ was first used around 1665.
• The basso continuo concept plays a curious role in the development of the cello. Born around 1600, it was a wonderful solution whereby all bass instruments could be featured in their own way. For example, in Frescobaldi’s Canzone per basso solo (ca.1630), the harpsichord and cello play or two cellos lay almost exactly the same notes, a variation on continuo playing, but as if refined. It be came immediately apparent that bass parts could also be played on the cello alone and sound very effective. This was especially the case in pieces with implied counterpoint (e.g. ricercare).
• During the last decades of the seventeenth century, composers of both violin and cello music appear to have worked on two distinct levels. On the first, that of the published repertory, composers produced contrapuntally sound and musically satisfying works that were not especially challenging to the instrumentalist. On the second, these same musicians produced virtuoso showpieces, which were never published-probably because because these more difficult works were intended for performance only by the composer.
• Early idiomatic writing for the violin did not necessarily exclude the deeper voices of the violin family. Cellists considering themselves to be ‘violinists’ (albeit ‘bass violinists’), quite naturally adopted the violin repertoire as their own (transposing it down an octave), making no distinction between the various voices within the family of violins than do singers today with their solo repertoire.
• As early as the first half of the 17th century, the cello part was very often of equal importance to that of the violin, sometimes even demanding a virtuoso technique. The violinists of the time were indeed held as models for the cellists, but the two instruments did not have such distinct roles as today. A violinist played all ‘violins,’ even the biggest, as a matter of course.
• In Italy at the time of the Renaissance and Baroque, the cello developed from a mainly accompanying instrument into a solo instrument in a short time. Late seventeenth-century Bologna stands apart as the mother lode: cellist-composers such as (Domenico Gabrielli, Giuseppe Jacchini, and Domenico Galli) produced some of the earliest compositions written specifically for the solo violoncello.
• The most common form for the earliest solo cello literature was the baroque ricercare.

Question 4

Define the baroque ricercare.

Answer 4

• The baroque ricercare was an instrumental piece, not too lengthy, and in many cases for only one instrument.
• In the sixteenth century, the word ricercar could refer to several types of compositions; terminology was flexible, even lax then.
• Ricercars fall into two general types: a predominantly homophonic piece, with occasional runs and passagework, not unlike a toccata; and a sectional work in which each section begins imitatively, usually in a variation form. The second type of ricercar, the imitative, contrapuntal type, was to prove the more important historically, and eventually developed into the fugue.
• It had several different functions in the musical society of the time: first, as a vehicle for secular instrumental expression, and second in the church service in alternation with the choir, either during the offertory or before or after the reading of the psalms.
• Sometimes the ricercare would consist of a piece for more than one instrument, in which case the theme was passed from one part of another in imitative counterpoint without too much development. It is not possible to establish a perfectly consistent form for these pieces. The connecting link between them is the presence of a simple theme in a definite key and rhythm which established the tonality and character.

Question 5

Piece(s): Solo cello work(s) by Antonii

Answer 5

• Composer: Giovanni Battista degli Antonii
• Title: 12 Ricercate for unaccompanied violoncello
• Date: 1687
• These pieces contain very idiomatic cello writing; Antonii may well have been a cellist (though this is uncertain?).
• As the designation ‘violoncello or clavicembalo’ indicates, the score would also have been used, on occasion, by a harpsichord player as a bass on which to make improvisions, a practice known as partimento. In seven of the pieces, the composer added figured bass symbols to the score in order to facilitate this use. Many of the ricercare are written in perpetual motion style, consisting of running eighth notes.
• written for a cello of six strings, tuned like the contemporary viol except for a scordatura of the lowest string, depending on the key. This tuning pattern would be C G C E A D.
• 6 of the 12 are in one style, with 8th notes throughout, and the other half are in different meters.

Question 6

Piece(s): Solo cello work(s) by Gabrielli

Answer 6

• Composer: Domenico Gabrielli
• These pieces are very idiomatic; Gabrielli was a master cellist.
• Title: 7 Ricercate sopra il Violoncello o cembalo
• Date: ca.1689
• Although Domenico Gabrielli is often given credit for being the first composer to write solo literature for the cello, the first known manuscript of his solo cello music dates from 1689, two years after the Antonii publication.
• Much variety and color exists within them. The use of many different rhythmic patterns, double and triple stops, and figurative material adds greatly to their musical interest as pieces.
• They have numbers here and there so that a figured basse for the right hand of a continuo instrument could be realized. In this music, as in Gabrielli’s solo works we can see the beginning of a development which culminates in the style of the Bach cello suites.
• Titles: Sonatas Nos.1 &2 for cello and keyboard
• Date: ca.1689
• The earliest sonatas for cello and continuo.
• His two manuscript sonatas for violoncello and continuo both contain a good measure of multiple stops, and an Allegro section further elaborates its extended passage in sixteenth notes with bursts of thirty-second notes, precisely the kind of intricate diminutions that might characterize improvised solos.

Question 7

Piece(s): Solo cello work(s) by Galli

Answer 7

• Composer: Domenico Galli
• Title: 12 Trattenimento Musicale Sopra Il Violoncello A’ Solo
• Date: 1692
• The cello that the pieces were composed for was tuned in fourths: B flat, F, C, and G. The interest in them is primarily historical, as they lack for a certain amount of structural coherency.

Question 8

Piece(s): Solo cello work(s) by Jacchini

Answer 8

• Composer: Giuseppe Jacchini
• Title: 12 Sonate a Violoncello solo violin and cello ea per camera
• Date: 1692
• This is a representative example of a full-fledged cello sonata of the 1690s. The technical challenge here lies mostly in the passages of broken intervals played over two strings (mm. 11-12) and the rapid and extended sequential progressions (mm. 20-29).
• Jacchini was a very popular cellist, both as a soloist and as an accompanist.

Question 9

Piece(s): Solo cello work(s) by Bononcini

Answer 9

• Composer: Antonio Bononcini
• Title: 12 Sonatas for violoncello and bass o continuo
• Date: ca.1693
• highly virtuosic
• they resemble nothing from the 1690s: despite the blossoming cello literature written by the Bolognese virtuosos mentioned above, not one from among their published works approaches the length and virtuosic level of these pieces by Bononcini
• Compositions of the 1690s for the cello average around 100 measures in length whereas the average for Bononcini’s sonatas easily exceeds 200 (the shortest is 190 mm.; the longest, 307). Multiple stopping on the violoncello in most of the previously known literature occurs only infrequently and for brief passages. In Bononcini’s sonatas entire pages of music (up to a dozen measures) comprise passages wholly in double stops.
• resemble more the cello sonatas of Benedetto Marcello and Antonio Vivaldi than anything from Bologna of the 1680s and 90s
• a strict reliance on a four-movement plan and the use of binary forms in pieces without dance titles. On the other hand, Bononcini’s sonatas are still longer and more difficult than those of Vivaldi and Marcello. The Venetian composers, moreover, did not use da capo form in their cello sonatas as Bononcini seemed fond of doing.
• strict reliance on a four-movement plan (slow-fast-slow-fast) in all twelve sonatas; this strictness of procedure is anomalous for instrumental music of the late seventeenth century. Arcangelo Corelli, for example, whose sonatas are sometimes taken as the models for the period, used this pattern in little more than half of his sonatas.
• the closest analog that we have to 1690s improvisatory practice on the violoncello, precisely the sort of thing that was not usually written down, much less published.
• During the last decades of the seventeenth century, composers of both violin and cello music appear to have worked on two distinct levels. On the first, that of the published repertory, composers produced contrapuntally sound and musically satisfying works that were not especially challenging to the instrumentalist. On the second, these same musicians produced virtuoso showpieces, which were never published-probably because because these more difficult works were intended for performance only by the composer.

Question 10

What was a common tuning for the cello in Bologna ca.1650-1699?

Answer 10

In Bologna ca.1650-1699, the cello was tuned, from the bottom up, C-G-D-G. This is the same tuning Bach utilizes in his 5th cello suite.