damian dlugolecki wrote:
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
To get on or off this list see list information at
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
Tocsin is an alarm sounded by a bell f rom the Old French touquesain
charles
