Dance at a Glance: French Baroque Style and Early Music's Existential Crisis
by G. Tiao

Each of the traditional French baroque dances, according to the handy and self-consciously droll primer for the uninitiated, Dance-at-a-Glance (Being a Quick Musical Guide), has its own particular tone, tempo, and affect. The loure, for example, is “haughty with interspersed frenetic moments”; the rigaudon boasts a “brawny, vigorous” affect; the sarabande is “expressive” and “highly ornamented” — the courante, “sophisticated” — the bourrée, simply, “gay”. Many of these dances were performed in the “French ouverture style”, or notes inégales, a manner of swinging notes of equal rhythmic value in a kind of “foppish swagger that took one’s breath away” (John Byrt, “Writing the Unwritable: John Byrt explains why some baroque texts are more equal than others,” The Musical Times 138.1847. January 1997, 18-24). The inégal technique lent the dance piece a special charge – not quite sex appeal, as with liberties taken with jazz rhythms, but rather a galumphing, playful – almost goofy – distinction, light-footed and dignified. It was different; odd enough to make the practice a subject of much notice and interest for musicologists in the 1960s and 70s, who quickly discovered that this difference was generative — they found they could not agree on any aspect of the “French style,” from when it could be most appropriately applied, to what particular proportion of inequality was meant by a given notation. (The problem was exacerbated somewhat by the fact that it was, for all practical purposes, impossible to precisely notate inégal rhythm.)

This querelle des inégales inspired rhetoric as varied as the dances themselves, from the theatrics and melodrama of critical back-and-forthing (“The more than 600 pages of [this] study will strike terror into the hearts of many performers”! “We will never again perform music from this period in the same way”! (Buelow 638-639). (Laurence Dreyfus, “Early Music Defended against its Devotees: A Theory of Historical Performance in the Twentieth Century,” The Musical Quarterly 69.3. Summer 1983, 297-322)) to the pomp and showy solemnity of scholastic philosophizing (“The reconstruction of the original instruments verifiably used by a medieval, Renaissance, or Baroque composer is taken as essential to the meaning of the music before the idea of essential instrumentation becomes historically operable” (Laurence Dreyfus, “Early Music Defended against its Devotees: A Theory of Historical Performance in the Twentieth Century,” The Musical Quarterly 69.3. Summer 1983, 297-322)).

The language of these contentious articles transgressed far beyond the usual bland academic niceties: words like “delusion,” “simplistic,” “infuriating,” and “disingenuous” were pointedly deployed, along with the liberal use of deprecating quotation marks. There were namings of names, not-so-nice intimations of others’ critical integrity and capabilities, sullen concessions of points well made, and a general air of badly-concealed resentment all around. One scholar who dared to wade into the thick of things felt justified in resorting to the language of political warfare to describe the situation:

Pinning where, exactly, one fell on the sliding scale of interpretive looseness or restraint held all the seriousness of declaring one’s political allegiance or one’s particular brand of theology: were you conservative? loose constructivist? Orthodox? (Was there a categorically “good” or “bad” interpretive approach? Could there be? Would a “bad” hermeneutics condemn a performer to burn in the hell of critical exorcism? so the line of self-questioning continued.)

Early Music had, in effect, stumbled into its own adolescence: the movement had come into its own during the 60s and 70s as a reaction to avant-garde atonality and the excessive individualism of mainstream classical music. The musicological values it championed – chief among them, authenticity – reflected this: the reverence accorded to a composer’s “original intent” was absolute, almost “oddly theological”, as one critic observed, but it served, in the eyes of its proponents, as a much-needed counterweight to the insufferable and self-aggrandizing individualism embodied by big-name soloists of the day. “Authentic” instruments and costumes, historic styles of performance, critical editions of scores and parts were all necessary props to make a pointedly visible rejection of the offending values of the mainstream and the avant-garde.

Now, ushered into its sophomoric stage with the opening salvos of the querelle des inégales, Early Music preoccupied itself with questioning its philosophy of being. The critical community had discovered, overnight, that their squabble over inégales had opened up a Pandora’s box of contention: no one could agree on proper, or “authentic” performance or interpretation, or, for that matter, whether this was important or not—what all of it meant for early music—what “Early Music” meant to begin with. As Laurence Dreyfus said, what was needed was “a theory of Early Music … embracing both explanation and critique” (Dreyfus, 298).

Part of the problem lay in the spottiness of the paper record: composers only sporadically notated notes inégales in their works, often relying on a tacit performance protocol, apprehended by all musicians of the age, to cue performers as to when and how inégal was to be played. Determining an inégal practice became for musicologists as scientific a process as divination — part guesswork and part psychoanalysis, the self-proclaimed objectivity of Early Music performance belied the fundamentally subjective process of crawling into a composer’s brain that scholars and conductors found themselves repeatedly attempting in the name of authenticity. And this was dangerous ground: much of the value attributed to the movement was entrenched in its intimate connection to verifiable history, in the idea that history could be objectively accessed – and that history was best served that way.

In fact, one of the most persistent criticisms of Early Music was its sheer stuffiness, its excessive preoccupation with history, which threatened to swamp the musical portion of the whole endeavor. As flutist and chamber instrumentalist Samuel Barton said, “You don’t have to reconstruct the Globe Theatre to present a meaningful Shakespeare performance.” When asked for his opinion on the attempt to reach a compromise in the inégal controversy through a mix of dotted and undotted ornamental styles, pianist Colin Tilney exclaimed, “I would never have dreamed of working out [a compromise with all] the various dotted and undotted combinations! …If you were that punctilious the music would have gone clean out of the window, to my mind: all you would hear would be a determination to be somehow ‘correct.’” Was Early Music music, or was it reenactment, akin to the quaint and devoted fakery of Renaissance fairs and Civil War battle reenactments? What makes something music, and not merely ideology, a dusted-off museum piece?

Curiously – and perhaps, tellingly – there was little direct discussion in musicology journals about Early Music as art – a creative practice. Inégal discussions treated music as if it were a closed topic, hermetically sealed by history, and the task at hand was merely to determine what, exactly, was inside the bag. Little wonder that Early Music was facing its greatest existential crisis to date: essential to any art – and especially for music, the most ephemeral art – is that component of freedom, the necessary space art requires to be art. The querelle should have been a wider discourse on freedom, a matter of seeing inégal less as stricture and rigidity than as ornamentation – an issue of taste, of artistic judgment, and not of historical fact.

The issue of inégal circles back around to the problem of interpretation, to the idea of music as an essentially linguistic art — rhetoric, complete with all its attendant difficulties of articulation and translation. This was, after all, where the trouble began – the impossibility of freezing onto the page something as fleet and motive as music. The composers of the French baroque didn’t consistently try — and rightly so; they could rely on their musicians, on their own capabilities as performers of the music they wrote, to carry the music through. But they and their musicians are long dead, and modern performers of French baroque – musicians and dancers alike – find themselves rather unexpectedly in the company of their bookish brethren, facing an ages-old issue typically reserved for those in the textual arts: translation — always translation, that tipsy dance.

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