On Feb 17, 2013, at 4:03 PM, Christopher Stetson <christophertstet...@gmail.com> wrote:
> When it could be assumed that the audience members > were, by and large, of a higher status than the performers? Or perhaps > one of those inverted, false modesty kind of deals? Yes and no, I think. Well into the post-Napoleonic age, the best musicians would almost always be performing for persons of much higher social rank, because they paid best. It went without saying that they would behave as subservients; anything else would be extremely rude. So the modesty would not be false at all. But there may be something else going on. Persons of the lower classes did not, as a rule, bow to each other, but persons of the upper classes did. "At your service" was a courteous greeting between gentlemen. Da Ponte captures this in (Mozart's) Don Giovanni, when Don Juan asks who the groom is at a peasant wedding, and Masetto answers "Io, per servile (I, at your service") and the Don responds, condescendingly if not mockingly, "O bravo! Per servirmi! Questo e vero parlar da galantuomo! (At my service! This is truly spoken like a gentleman!)" Da Ponte could pack a lot of meaning into a few words. The Don finds Masetto's genteel words cute, or presumptuous, or more likely both. So the demeanor of musicians in concerts may be a way of saying, "we know how to behave among people of the best quality." Performers traditionally dress in formal (i.e., impractical) clothes and comport themselves with dignity and bow properly. So it's possible that bowing is actually a way of elevating the musicians' status. At least they don't tug at their forelocks. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
