Notes inégales

The practice of notating pairs of unequal note lengths as pairs with equal notated value may go as far back as the earliest music of the Middle Ages; indeed some scholars believe that some plainchant of the Roman Catholic Church, including Ambrosian hymns, may have been performed as alternating long and short notes.

The earliest treatises that mention inequality of notes in performance indicate that the reason for this practice is to add beauty or interest to a passage which otherwise would be plain.

In addition, the inégales could only function on one metrical level; for example, if sixteenths are to be played long–short, long–short, an even eighth-note pulse must be carefully maintained for the music to retain its shape.

[2] In Georg Muffat's codification of notes inégales in the Lullist tradition, he says it is the first level of diminution that is subject to inequality procedure.

Also, musical clocks have been discovered from the period that show the dotting very clearly[3][4] as such devices have "preserved performances of notes inégales that are often as subtle as a 3:2 ratio (i.e. three fifths of a beat for the first note, two fifths for the second in the pair), as well as the more obvious 2:1 ratio (triplets), and 3:1 (dotted eighth–sixteenth pairs and their multiples).

In particular, in much of French music, and a lot in Handel as well, there are problems the performer faces, and the most prevalent one is this: sometimes at the approach of cadences in an notes inégales texture, the composer suddenly writes some dotted notes out explicitly and sometimes then stops; the inconsistency of dotting has continued to be a problem for every musicologist, theoretical and performer.

Often, the long–short version of notes inégales was indicated by slurred pairs of notes throughout the French repertoire in François Couperin, Jacques Duphly, Antoine Forqueray, Pierre Dumage, Louis-Nicolas Clérambault, Jean-François Dandrieu, and Jean-Philippe Rameau, to cite the more prominent keyboard composers from the French Baroque.

In Restoration England, in the French modelled, Lullist influenced works of Henry Purcell, William Croft, Jeremiah Clarke and their contemporaries, the short–long slurred pairs of notes inégales can be found throughout the musical literature, and often variant sources "write out" the short–long "snapped" notes inégales rhythms explicitly.

One of the best sources for understanding the situation of notes inégales in France is the notation of music by composers from other European countries who wrote imitations of it.

Music from Italy, Germany and England all borrowed this feature of French music, with the difference that the inequality of note values was often notated, since not all performers could be expected to add the notes inégales themselves (though evidence from Georg Muffat and Telemann strongly suggests that German performers would certainly be familiar with them).

One school of thought attempted to show that the French practice was actually widespread in Europe, and performance of music by composers as diverse as Bach and Scarlatti should be suffused with dotted rhythms; another school of thought held that even-note playing was the norm in their music unless dotted rhythms were explicitly notated in the score.

Evidence on both sides of the argument is compelling; for example 17th-century English writings recommending unequal playing (Roger North's autobiographical Notes of Me, written around 1695, describes the practice explicitly, in reference to English lute music), as well as François Couperin, who wrote in L'art de toucher le clavecin (1716), that in Italian music, Italians always write the notes exactly the way they want them played.

Bach famously imitated the style in Contrapunctus II from the Art of Fugue; however, in this piece the notes inégales are written out as dotted rhythms.

In his teens, Bach travelled and studied at the French-modelled Court of Georg Wilhelm in Celle (near Lüneburg) in northern Germany, where there was an orchestra modelled on the Concert Royal of Lully.

However, like often in the French literature, there are also inconsistencies which have never been fully explained where dots start and then stop for no clear reason, but as Newman has observed, mostly this happens towards the approach to cadences.

But in general, in many of his suites, and even his orchestral music, the application of notes inégales finds a solid home in Handel.

He was strongly influenced by Georg Muffat's nephew, who will be discussed below, and perhaps that is a part of Handel's reception of the French Style of playing.

And occasionally one finds movements that don't seem necessarily "French", as over the years, Handel did develop a very strong "English" style that was unique to him, but nonetheless, sound very much more "revealed" when subjected to notes inégales aka inequality procedure.

The entire corpus of stylistic practices related to the Lullist model, of which notes inégales was one of the most significant features of rhythmic alteration, was perhaps widely spread throughout late 17th and early 18th-century Germany and Austria by the Austrian composer Georg Muffat.

He went to the Lullist court to study and codify the Lullist performance practices and did it in an exhaustive foreword to his Florilegium Secundum, a collection containing orchestral suites based on the models and performance practices of Lully, synthesized with Muffat's studies with Corelli in Italy, which he previously presented to the musical public in his Armonico Tributo and Florilegium Primum.

Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer, a highly influential composer, who lived a generation before Bach, also "adopted" this new transformation of an Austrian/German national musical style.

Fischer's most famous suite in D minor – Uranie from his collection of very French influenced suites found in the collection Musicalischer Parnassus – feature and Allemande and Courante that "need" notes inégales; and with the application of notes inégales Fischer's strong artistic compositional hand become even more evident.

Couperin does this in the Courante and the Gavotte, expecting the performer to take the various embellishments, rhythmic alterations and ornaments, and apply them "le bon gout" (in good taste) throughout his oeuvre.

It is clear there was a precedent by composers to give models for the correct study and realization of performance practice issues in the works themselves, often in the context of an oral tradition where there was no need to write a treatise.

Muffat, publishing his Florilegium with multilingual prefaces, clearly intending his work to be widely published (which it was), and as there would be no opportunity for an oral tradition to transmit the performance practices, he decided in order for the music to be played correctly, he would codify the Lullist practices – with musical examples of how to perform the ornaments, interpret the various rhythmic alterations including notes inégales, as well as tempo instructions, and bowing instructions, and when and where to apply notes inégales and all the variety of Lullist embellishment and ornamentation, especially when there is no obvious indication.

His extremely detailed codification of notes inégales and the Lullist performance practices, and in practical combination with his suites, and including further explication by explicit half encoded/half written out solutions to demonstrate the correct and appropriate application of notes inégales in the Premiere suite of the Florilegium Secundum, would achieve a clarity of understanding the rhythmic alteration procedure of notes inégales to a huge musical circle beyond his personal scope and of his musical circle which included his colleague Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber's world in 17th century Salzburg, Austria.

In England, style Francese was deliberately introduced in the 17th century by order of the King, sending a 14-year-old exceptionally talented chorister and composer, the young Henry Purcell, to the Lullist court to study and master the style of Lully and the Lullist orchestra "Chapel Royal" which had become famous throughout Europe, after which Purcell was to return to England to form an English version of the Chapel Royal.

Perhaps one of the most famous instances of notes inégales, which for many years was incorrectly heard (and played) is in the so-called "Masterpiece Theatre" trumpet tune.

This famous trumpet tune is actually a French baroque work, Fanfare-Rondeau, by Jean-Joseph Mouret incorrectly attributed to Jeremiah Clarke.

(further citations and examples to come SJ) An alternative point of view is that this idea of Notes Inégales as uneven beats with a fixed perfectly regular amount of swing as in modern Jazz is completely wrong.