Who were the prominent composers of the Neapolitan school?
What was the influence of this school?
The period of Scarlatti’s work extends approximately from the English Revolution of 1688, which drove James II from the throne, to the end of the reign of George I. In American Colonial history this period is one of gathering strength in the various provinces on the Atlantic Coast.
LESSON XX.
Singing and Singers.
Early Methods of Singing.—As has been noted by the reader, music, up to this time, developed principally along vocal lines. We have no details as to the character of the training of singers among the Chaldeans, Egyptians and Greeks except such as indicate that their idea of singing was a sort of musical declamation. Such seems also to have been the idea of the nations in the north of Europe.
We have seen that the Welsh bards were required to undergo a very thorough and exacting course of study, but the practical side of singing and the rules laid down for the training of the young minstrels is not a part of our knowledge. The songs of the early Church, sung by masses of worshipers, were of necessity simple in every way, requiring no art. It was not until the use of Discant became popular, and the Polyphonic school began to use florid writing that we can infer that there must have been some methods of training vocalists for artistic work. Although we have little or no details as to the course of training which the early singers received, we are justified in assuming that they must have possessed skill in execution of no mean order. It must not be forgotten that practically all the composers of the early Polyphonic school were singers, able to execute their own works. Hence, studies in singing must have gone hand in hand with composition. The voice parts of the masses, motets and madrigals of the composers of the 13th to the 16th centuries have absolute independence of progression, syncopations, embellishments, etc., to such an extent that it taxes the musicianship of the chorus singer of the present day to sing them; they are not only exacting in intonation, rhythm and other musical matters but also in mechanical points, such as flexibility and freedom of voice and thorough breath control.
Influence of the Opera on Singing.—When the Opera was established, after the declamatory style offered by the first composers had proven unsuccessful in holding the public, the florid style of the old discanters was revived and modified, which, as the Opera developed, gave a great impetus to a systematic and thorough study of singing. The new style of melody introduced by the opera composers of the 17th century demanded purity of voice, wide range, flexibility, expressive shading and a marvelous breath control, as well as great physical endurance. Singers were expected to execute the most intricate passages, abounding in diatonic and chromatic scales, arpeggios, turns, gruppettos, trills, etc., of the most elaborate nature, passages such as are considered purely instrumental today. Alessandro Scarlatti, the composer, and himself a singer, is credited with having had much to do with the great development in the art of singing. He trained a number of singers and pupils, and thus founded the “old Italian” school of singing. It was natural that the art side of singing should thus develop in Italy for several reasons, notably, because Italy had a great number of highly-trained composers, the character of the language is such as to lend itself to the requirements of artistic singing, broad full vowels, soft consonants, absence of final consonants, etc., and the enthusiastic, essentially lyric temperament of the race.
The Training of a 17th Century Singer.—We are given an idea of the course of training which singers of the 17th century were obliged to observe in a work Historia Musica, published by G. A. A. Buontempi, in 1695. This contains an account of the regulations of a school for singers in Rome, directed by Virgilio Mazzocchi, in which Buontempi was a pupil: The pupils were obliged to devote one hour each day to the singing of difficult passages with the idea of acquiring experience; one hour to the practice of the trill, one to passages in agility, one to literary studies, one to vocalises and to various other technical exercises under the direction of a teacher and before a mirror to acquire the certainty that the singer did not make a faulty movement of the face, the forehead, the eyes or the mouth. This was the morning’s work. In the afternoon, a half-hour was given to theory study, the same amount to writing counterpoint on plain-song melodies, then to learning and applying the rules of composition (writing on an erasable sheet); then followed a half-hour of study of a literary nature, and the rest of the day was given to practice on the clavichord, to the composition of a psalm, motet, canzonetta, or any other kind of piece according to the pupil’s choice. Such were the common exercises of those days when the pupils were kept on duty at the school. On other days, they would go outside the Angelica Gate to sing against the famous echo that was found there, listening to the response in order to criticise their work. Other duties were to sing in nearly all the musical solemnities of the various churches, to study attentively the style of the great singers of the day, to make a report of their observations to their master, who, the better to impress the result of their studies upon the minds of his pupils, added remarks and advice as he deemed necessary. Under such discipline it is not astonishing that the Italian singers attained a high degree of excellence, and became not only distinguished singers but skilful composers as well. That the reader may gather an idea of the character of passages executed by these singers an example is given on the previous page.
AIR for BASS
