In 1604, under the title Lachrimae or seaven teares figured in seaven passionates pauans...set for the Lute, or Viols, or Violins by Iohn Dowland, there appeared in London some of the most evocative pages in the English literature of melancholy. The seven pavanes by Dowland constitute, as he him- self says in the preface to the edition, a long meditation on melancholy.

 

The musical elements which Dowland uses in the cycle of the Lachrimae are many and perfectly adapted to the idea that the musician sets out to represent.

 

To start with, if the choice of the pavane is analysed in the context of contemporary English writing, two essential points must be considered. In the first place it is clear that, since the beginning of the 16th Century, the pavane constitutes an instrumental genre independent of the practice of the dance, even if it retained the scheme fundamental to the tripartite dance, articulated in musical phrases of four bars. Moreover, in its new instrumental guise, it is characterised by its tardo e lento movement, becoming the expressive moment of the “suite”. Affetti and effetti infect the sober progress of its melodic lines, and open the way to these experiences for the most avant-garde of the English composers of the 16th Century.

 

In this-context, it is obvious that the choice of the pavane must have seemed logical to a Dowland wishing to create an instrumental cycle about melancholy. The musical language which he employs is extremely complex. The Lachrimae, in all their transformations, are derived from an identical melodic incipit. The descending tetrachord, which serves as their motif, indeed even as their signature, is composed in what the musical grammar of the 16th Century considered to be the mode symbolic of Melancholy - the Phrygian. At this time the motif which introduced the Lachrimae already has a long history. It appears in a great number of Franco-Flemish songs, and then one finds its echo in the Lamento d’Orfeo of Poliziano set to music by Costanzo Festa, Francesco Layolle, Philippe Verdelot and Matteo Rampollini. Finally, used as an ostinato, it will serve as a vehicle for the most sombre pages in the emergent baroque opera.

 

Each pavane is divided into three parts - the first and third finish on a “chord” of A minor, the second in E major. The theme which serves as a thread through the whole cycle of the Lachrimae is replied to by a clausula, which ends each of the sections and which is always entrusted to the lute. In fact all the elements brought together by Dowland return in an obsessional manner. The theme comes back seven times, the endings on the lute and the harmonies twenty-one times, and let us not forget that, at the end of each part, we also find a repeat sign. In practice, the melancholy, of which Dowland wishes to speak to us, is a melancholy imprisoned in a vicious circle of elements which always bring us back to its origin. Also, like an obsession which, with each return, is enriched with nuances and ever new complications, in the returns of Dowland the sound material undergoes minute but infinite metamorphoses.

 

Melancholy is anchored in the depths of consciousness, and from these depths it stirs. The supremacy of the two voices of the cantus is always disturbed by the turbulence of the three lower voices. In their development the Lachrimae are progressively charged with the attributes of an inevitable gravitas and the endless recurrence of the elements already described, which lead us, at the end of the compostion, to an infinitely long harmonic suspension. Here the musical fabric appears to dissolve, to disappear entirely, to sink and be reduced to a silent stillness. In the experience of melancholy, it is the silence of human frailty which speaks.

 

To the black ink of Dowland’s melancholy we wished to contrast a sequence of instrumental Stile Fantastico compositions, daughters of the creative flow of genius, enthusiastic and chaotic.

 

This term, like that of mannerism, has entered the jargon of musicology quite recently. The only lexicographic entry occurs in Athanas Kircher, who, in his Misurgia Universalis, uses it to designate instrumental pieces of improvised character, free of all metric periodicity (solutae), but also compositions rich in contrapuntal devices. The Stile Fantastico, then, favours the musical forms based on improvisation, such as the prélude and the toccata, or the ricercare and the fantasie, those styles generally deprived of all structural constraints.

The fantastica musical writing developed within the crisis of the modal system. The composers of the Renaissance, as with the madrigal already, were forced into acute consideration of the balance between words and music. The supremacy of the text, the creation of figurae and modules which could represent it in its complexity, constrained the authors to review, at least in part, the very practice of composition. Dislocated expressionism and harmonic instability constituted the very practice of composition. Dislocated expressionism and harmonic instability constituted the musical elements of this new trend. With the madrigal, we can affirm that the banks, between which flowed the musical ideas, channelled by modality and ordinary counterpoint, had been shattered. If we cannot maintain with certainty that the Stile Fantastico is derived from the musical grammar of the madrigal, it is nevertheless possible to ascertain that it was fed and nourished by it. The cohabitation in the same composition of contrasting modes (commixtio modi), the deviation of clausulae foreign to the mode, the modal deviations, unforeseen and short lived, the chromaticism, the false relationships, the incursions into undreamt of regions of harmony, are the salient points of the musical literature of the genere fantastico.

 

In the Stile Fantastico the sense of travel, of exploration, harks back to the unreal and extraordinary visions of the ship's logbooks and novels of 16th Century authors, but in our case it is more like a flight on the hippogriff of Harmony.

 

 

OF MELANCHOLY

Melancholy: black bile, the term derived from the Greek Melankholia — from melas-anus, black, and khole, bile. Literally, in the system which dominated the history of medical thought from deep antiquity until the 19th Century, melancholy is above all a humour, that is to say an active substance with well-defined properties, which is to the temperament what the earth is to the physics of the four elements. The term then indicates one of the four temperaments (choleric, fiery, phlegmatic and melancholic), an equivocal term which, over the centuries, fostered a prolific confusion between music, the theory of the passions and musical composition. Blended from variable proportions of blood, phlegm and yellow bile, it controlled the health and determined the characters of all beings. The ancient physics thinks of the character of a thing as a combination of elements with contrasting qualities. The blood is warm and wet, the yellow bile warm and dry, the phlegm cold and wet and the black bile cold and dry. The humours operate as rival powers. When they collide in action with an antagonistic substance, they act with moderation, preserving health and equilibrium - the purer they are, the more effectively they perform.

 

If the equality of the rights (isonomia) between the qualities of the wet, the dry, the cold, the warm, the bitter and the sweet preserve health, the preponderance of one over the others produces a temporary change in the physical and somatic equilibrium, causes illness and, sometimes, immoderate psychical states. Choler, then, is only the somatic expression of an excess of yellow bile, and depression the consequence of a growth of black bile. In their generation passions and characters follow a classic logical model, which musical theory shares, since the remotest times, with medicine and the physics of the elements - the dialectic of the Same and the Other. The Same assimilates, reconciles, links up opposites into one whole. It has the power to make things identical with each other, to blend them, to make their differences disappear. If its action was not balanced by a principle of disorder, every individual would be as alike as two drops of water, and the life of the spirit would be reduced to a dreary and interminable equality of the mind, a kind of apathetic zero.

 

An enemy of all limitation, the Other promotes the irreducible individuality of the parties; it differentiates them, encouraging them to escape from the system; it maintains things in their isolation; it encloses each species in its unyielding difference to persevere in what it is. In the domain of sound, it generates dissonance, contrasting as a conflict the extremes of the intervals, and in the temperament, it creates excess and excrescences, which induce passions and contrary states of mind.

If the psychical states produced by a humour constitute in themselves an anomaly conceivable in terms of “dissonance”, the alterations produced by melancholy presuppose a double dissonance. While the other humours maintain a relatively constant degree of dryness and temperature, the black humour is an active substance particularly unstable from the dynamic point of view, which tradition compares sometimes to eau-de-vie, sometimes to wine or to iron. It produces particularly subtle spirits, fluid and inflammable, like alcoholic fumes. When they burn they climb into the brain, inflame the imagination, increase intellectual activity, producing a state of temporary delirium accompanied by the most varied behaviour, which makes men frenzied or apathetic, gay or sad, taciturn or loquacious, elated, cowardly, reckless, stupid or inspired. However, ardour is ephemeral. After the fire, melancholy cools it, plunging the fantasy into a state of extreme dejection. Duly tempered by the blood and the pituitary, it is like a glowing iron bar. It retains its heat for a long time, assuring the artist extended work in the grip of enthusiasm.

 

For the author of Problem XXX, attributed to Aristotle — the fundamental text of this tradition — the extreme quality of the melancholic humour allows the explanation for the unequal distribution of the gift of intelligence among mankind. Why was every man who excelled in philosophy, in politics, in poetry or in the arts manifestly melancholic? Towards the end of the 15th Century, after a period of relative inactivity, the thesis, that every form of genius was inevitably accompanied by mental disequilibrium, would obtain quite a new resonance , thanks to the writings of the man whom P. O. Kristeller defined as the most representative thinker of the Renaissance - Marsile Ficin.

 

Hellenist philosopher, editor and translator of Plato, personal physician to the Medicis, Ficin imposes on academic circles a decisive idea for artistic theory - inspiration. To the artist who proceeds by science and study, the academies will contrast the divine spirit, talented and depressive, creating in a state of grace - the intellect agitated and shaken by an internal energy, hidden, which is called fury. At the same time Ficin renews the ancient doctrines about the therapeutic value of music in the treatment of depressions. An enemy of all mediocrity, melancholy is also a dissonance of the mind divided in some irreconcilable states. It grows and expands with the most perfect contempt for the laws of the right milieu, but finds in musical harmony, which is in tune and tempered, its most powerful antidote. A musician self-taught by Heaven, Ficin is also one of the first authors to try to rediscover the legendary power of Greek music to modulate ad libitum the state of mind. In his De vita triplici — a work dedicated to a method of preserving the mental health of men of letters - scales and intervals dispute their psychotropic action with magic, sympathetic and astrological remedies. The word melancholy then assumes a third significance, indicating, when the movements of the troubled fantasy take form in the structure of the musical composition, one of the emotional qualities with which Renaissance psychology loves to clothe the elements of musical grammar.

 

Neoplatonic or lay, this psychology is formal - the temperament speaks. Like the imagination of the mother which can form the embryo by thought alone, the mind of the artist conceives an abstract image of the counterpoint, which travels in the melody, carrying the mind of the singer and the instrumentalist into the fantasy of the listener. Thus engaged, the emotion is then a tangible psychical value, even indeed quantifiable, surrounding, like a subtle body, the soul of the musical composition. Faithful to the etymology of the word melody - which refers to the anatomical limbs of living beings (in Greek melos) - Ficin in fact regarded counterpoint as an ethereal being, animated by an autonomous life, a sort of homuncule possessing all the faculties of living beings, breath, temperament and a variable range of specific characteristics, physically active. Counterpoint is harmony resulting from the blending of the four elements in variable proportions. Schematically one can demonstrate the following correlations:

 

Tessitura      Element     Humour      Temperament

Soprano       fire              yellowbile   choleric

Alto               air               blood           fiery

Tenor            water         phlegm        phlegmatic

Bass              earth          black bile    melancholic

 

It is a question of a thesis under the supervision of an ancient characterology, according to which, if choler raises the pitch of the voice, melancholy speaks with a low voice. Thus the Renaissance does not hesitate to attribute a depressed character to the modes lodged in the low registers. It is the same for the movement of the sharp, which transposes modes and melodies towards the treble, and the flat which drags them towards the bass. The black ink of music is dissonance in all its forms, episodic or architectural. In the passage of his De Vita, where he pushes the metaphor of the soul-harmony to the point of fixing mathematically the proportions of the melancholic temperament, Ficin plans the dosage of the humours according to a model to which the Pythagorean mathematicians accord an important role in the distorting metamorphosis of the consonances. The celebrated Zarlino could later affirm that the plaintive character of the intervals increases the complexity of their generative rapport, according to a thesis which Father Mersenne, in 1636, formulates in these terms:

 

Semitones and sharps represent tears and groans because of their small intervals which signify feebleness, for small intervals going up or down are similar to children, to the elderly and to those recovering from a long illness, who cannot walk with big steps and who take a long time to go a little way.

 

The music of Saturn, star of misfortune quodammodo dissonum, delights in the immeasurable, the dichotomy and the unresolved tension of incompatible elements. At the time of the blossoming of the expressionist madrigal, it will take shape in monstrous modal structures, composed from headless limbs, similar to the monsters generated in the reign of Hate in the fantasy of Empedocles; or again, as would be asserted by Tasso, divine and bilious poet, in the bodies of dissonant limbs, like the Chimera or the Hydra with a thousand heads.

 

 

 

Brenno Boccadoro V

Translation: Christopher S. Cartwright