A young lady of my acquaintance wrote the following for a short class
assignment in an Intro to Western Music class.   I am pleased to see her
write this in part because, when I made her acquaintance when she was
17, she was at most dimly aware of the existence of CM.  I am curious
what people think of her notion that it may have been normal for people
to socialize during concerts in the 18th century (my guess: in the home,
yes, at church, no).  I recall once hearing Ravi Shanker in concert, who
mentioned that the musicians on stage vocally supported one another
because, as he noted, Western audiences were silent during performance,
whereas in his native India he received vocal responses from the audience
during a performance.  Do the musicologists on the List think that
Descartes, or Cartesian thinking, helped shape music of the Baroque?

Finally, if anyone knows of Baroque opera being performed in the
Philadelphia area in the next couple of months, I'd appreciate your
passing it along.  When I suggested Shostakovich's "Lady MacBeth of
Mtsensk" as a graduation present, the young lady mentioned she'd prefer
to hear a Baroque opera.

   It is noted in Kerman's Listen that Baroque music somehow
   keeps its distance from the listener (Kerman, p. 99), even
   when it is supposed to be emotional.  This is the general
   impression I have always had of famous pieces from the late
   Baroque period: its formulaic and contained quality seemed
   to demonstrate emotions, but somehow in an impersonal sort
   of way.  It was hardly surprising to discover that musical
   composition of this period was shaped largely by the ideas
   of thinkers such as Rene Descartes, whose classification
   of the "affections" directly influenced their expression
   in music.  Baroque music was highly schematized because of
   Descartes' idea that human emotions can be ordered and so
   it followed that the representation of such emotions in
   music should also be ordered and controlled.

   Johann Mattheson was a musician who applied Descartes' ideas
   to musical composition, declaring that in order for music
   to fulfill its purpose as a "moral lesson," emotions should
   be "clipped or held by the reins" (Taruskin and Weiss, p.
   218).  This holding-the-music-by-the-reins effect is something
   I hear in Baroque music such as Vivaldi's Concerto in G.
   The first movement of this piece has a ritornello that
   returns three times, becoming more dramatic than before
   each time.  We can see these ritornellos and the expressive
   solos between them as out-of-control emotions that are
   allowed to run their course, but only to a certain limit.
   Vivaldi ends the movement with a simple restatement of the
   first ritornello, drawing back the passions into an orderly
   state.  The second movement of this piece does the same
   thing, with a theme in the beginning, variations and solos
   that are fast and dramatic, but then, they are reined in
   by the theme which returns at the end.  This variation form
   was commonly used in Baroque music, perhaps serving as a
   musical blueprint for expressing the emotions as Descartes
   classified and ordered them.

   I thought Samuel Sharp's account of opera-going in 18th
   century Naples was very interesting because of what seemed
   to be the Neopolitan audience's lack of interest in the
   music.  Maybe opera in the 18th century was like rock
   concerts today, a place where young people can gather to
   scope each other out, gossip, pass the time, all under the
   guise of the purpose of listening to music.  Samuel Sharp
   recounts a joke he heard about people in Naples who go to
   "see, not to hear an Opera" (Taruskin and Weiss, p.233),
   which I think ironically is the truth.  Considering that
   Baroque opera halls were probably highly ornate, if not
   downright distractingly gaudy, and that there are characters
   in costumes involved, it was very much a spectacle to see,
   perhaps even more than to listen.  It is also interesting
   that concert-goers get quite irritated nowadays when you
   talk during a performance (of course, this only applies to
   "classical music" concerts), although it may have been
   commonplace and even normal for people to socialize during
   concerts in the 18th century, when the availability of
   recorded music had not yet made live performances a rare
   opportunity to appreciate in silence.

Larry