Thesis submission ID 109 | created
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Ann Heneghan, Violin pedagogy in the mid-eighteenth century
Volumes, pp.: 1 (145pp.) Wordcount: 32,000
Repository (hard copy): NUIM Library (LO 1040)
General specialism: Musicology: Performance Studies
Abstract:
After every epoch of teeming artistic fertility there follows, inevitably, a period of scholarly analysis, when the utterances of genius are made to yield up their pedagogical fruits. When, as in music, idiomatic riteria are seen to have been met, technical method is boosted. By any standards, the golden age of the Italian Baroque, headed by Corelli, vivaldi and Tartini, must be accepted as having wielded an influence, on the emerging methodology of violin-playing, which is still felt today. In this thesis, documented violin method since the seventeenth century has been studied, to identify the development of its first climax; this, predicatably, coincided with the half-century between the deaths of Corelli and Tartini.
An initial general survey confirmed the reputation which adorns the three treatises which appeared between 1751 and 1761 - those of Francesco Geminiani, Leopold Mozart, and L'Abbé le fils. In spite of their geographical spread, it emerged that all could be traced to the same Italian sources. The primary aim of this thesis condquently was to concentrate on the relevance of these influences and of these tratises to present-day practice. While the principles of fingering and of position-playing were found to have been well established in the early eighteenth century in a way comparable with modern ideas, the violin-hold, the bow-grip, and the methods of bowing were discovered to have been only in a transitional stage, although certain paradigmatic tendencies were clear. These coincided with the continued growth in the ascendency of the Italian style of playing, and a corresponding decline in teh currency of French taste; it is suggested that this trend was fuelled by an appetite for virtuosic brilliance and power, as much as by the more characteristically artistic search for cantabile, beauty and evenness of tone-production. The limited repertoire of bow strokes available to the Baroque, and the inordinate pedagogical concern shown for the circumvention of their less attractive features, in addition to the documented difficulty in achieving a true legato (and therefore a singing quality of delivery), not only formulated the stylistic features of the violin music of the period, but produced the bow specification which would change that style. It is claimed that the achievements of the bow-maker, Francois Tourte, are therefore prefigured in the mid-eighteenth-century treatises.
It is also suggested that Dr Johnson's aphorism, 'to duge rightly of the present we must oppose it to the past' applies, paradoxically, by inversion; the realization of the interdependence of past and present as an accurate guide to style is a valuable by-product of the thesis, enlarging its scope somewhat, and showing that the search for authenticity in present and past contexts is but two sides of the same coin.
Ann Heneghan, Violin pedagogy in the mid-eighteenth century
MA, NUI Maynooth, 1991
Volumes, pp.: 1 (145pp.) Wordcount: 32,000
Repository (hard copy): NUIM Library (LO 1040)
General specialism: Musicology: Performance Studies
Abstract:
After every epoch of teeming artistic fertility there follows, inevitably, a period of scholarly analysis, when the utterances of genius are made to yield up their pedagogical fruits. When, as in music, idiomatic riteria are seen to have been met, technical method is boosted. By any standards, the golden age of the Italian Baroque, headed by Corelli, vivaldi and Tartini, must be accepted as having wielded an influence, on the emerging methodology of violin-playing, which is still felt today. In this thesis, documented violin method since the seventeenth century has been studied, to identify the development of its first climax; this, predicatably, coincided with the half-century between the deaths of Corelli and Tartini.
An initial general survey confirmed the reputation which adorns the three treatises which appeared between 1751 and 1761 - those of Francesco Geminiani, Leopold Mozart, and L'Abbé le fils. In spite of their geographical spread, it emerged that all could be traced to the same Italian sources. The primary aim of this thesis condquently was to concentrate on the relevance of these influences and of these tratises to present-day practice. While the principles of fingering and of position-playing were found to have been well established in the early eighteenth century in a way comparable with modern ideas, the violin-hold, the bow-grip, and the methods of bowing were discovered to have been only in a transitional stage, although certain paradigmatic tendencies were clear. These coincided with the continued growth in the ascendency of the Italian style of playing, and a corresponding decline in teh currency of French taste; it is suggested that this trend was fuelled by an appetite for virtuosic brilliance and power, as much as by the more characteristically artistic search for cantabile, beauty and evenness of tone-production. The limited repertoire of bow strokes available to the Baroque, and the inordinate pedagogical concern shown for the circumvention of their less attractive features, in addition to the documented difficulty in achieving a true legato (and therefore a singing quality of delivery), not only formulated the stylistic features of the violin music of the period, but produced the bow specification which would change that style. It is claimed that the achievements of the bow-maker, Francois Tourte, are therefore prefigured in the mid-eighteenth-century treatises.
It is also suggested that Dr Johnson's aphorism, 'to duge rightly of the present we must oppose it to the past' applies, paradoxically, by inversion; the realization of the interdependence of past and present as an accurate guide to style is a valuable by-product of the thesis, enlarging its scope somewhat, and showing that the search for authenticity in present and past contexts is but two sides of the same coin.
Thesis submission ID 109