G. Crona was kind enough to send a .jpg of the piece.
At the moment this is only a guess, but I believe the 'tocsin'
of Mouton and that of D. Gautier have something to do with
disease. The word 'toxin' only come into the English language
during the 19th century. My OED defines it originally as
"A specific poison...produced by a microbe which causes a
particular disease.' By this perhaps we can infer that this
was closer to the original French meaning than to our current
understanding of the word 'toxin' as some kinde of poison.
There were many diseases like typhus, smallpox, cholera etc.
that wiped out large numbers of
people. I need to find a French dictionary like my OED. My
Larousse does not have historical meanings or etymologies.
In any case, the pieces by Gautier and Mouton are very
similar, and it seems to me that the Mouton piece is
transposition to f#m of D. Gautier's piece in e minor. The
repeated low 'B' has a funerary feeling to me anyway and it
appears throughout Mouton's piece as a low C#. But even
though it is possible these 'tocsins' were about disease, they
are gigues and should be played at faster tempos. Played in
the salons of Paris during recurrences of 'la Peste' they were
perhaps demonstrations of musical 'black humor.'
Damian
The
Livre de Tablature p.86-87
Goëss Théorbe 170-171
Are there general rules of performance for a French gigue in
even metre
like this one? I heard recordings of gigues by Froberger for
the
harpsichord (can't remember the performer) which were played
extremely
inegale, as though inegality was the major trait of gigues.
Does the title (euqivalent to tocsin in modern French and
English, I
assume) indicate fast tempo?
--
Mathias
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