Old Byzantine and Russian Liturgical Chant

Abstract

Restoration expressive style recalls the old techniques of madrigalism, but the emphasis is less pictorial and more dramatic. A guide to the contemporary esthetic on this subject is found in a passage in Christopher Simpson's Compendium of Musick (first edition, 1667), enjoining the apt expression of the sense and humour of the words. Blow's practice coincides with Simpson's theory in his appropriate treatment of grave and light words and in his use of chromatics and suspensions for passions of love, sorrow, and anguish, of strenuous movements for anger, courage, and revenge, of dissonances for cruel, bitter, and harsh sentiments, of rising or falling lines for words implying high or low, and of rests for sighs and sobbs. Simpson was a poor prophet, however, in stating that the use of many notes to a syllable was going out of fashion. Both Blow's and Purcell's songs became increasingly melismatic and paved the way for the luxuriant coloratura display affected by Italian prima donnas in the i8th-century English pleasure-gardens. In the declamatory style Blow and his pupils, following Lawes' sound principles of just note and accent, set down punctiliously the exact note-values desired; but they broke away from his more mechanical declamation by avoiding regular periods, rests at the beginning of successive lines, and regular line-endings, and added not only the expressive melismas already mentioned, but numerous verbal repetitions. More generally, they departed from the balance and literary nicety of the transition period to a display of florid asymmetry, verging on distortion and virtuosity, which brought them into step with similar tendencies throughout Western Europe and throughout all the arts.