You are quite right David. I just looked up 'tocsin' in my
OED where the earliest usage in English is in 1598. I just
assumed it was an earlier spelling of 'toxin' which led me to
my incorrect interpretation. Never encountered the word
'tocsin' with that meaning. The OED reads, "an alarm signal,
sounded by ringing a bell or bells; used orig. and esp. in
reference to France."
Thanks for clearing that up.
Damian
Subject: [LUTE] Re: le Tocsein de Gautier
I might have missed something here, getting into the
discussion late
(I rejoined today---hellew everyone), but doesn't the
English word
"tocsin" refer to the pealing of a bell? I always thought
"tocsin"
came from an old form of French. Could some form of the
word have
existed in French in the 17th century with a similar
meaning? Used
perhaps in similar sense to Vallet's piece depicting bells
in a
village church.
Davidr
dlu...@verizon.net
On Dec 27, 2008, at 7:48 PM, damian dlugolecki wrote:
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.'
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