Ru
EnA. Maltseva
Musical figures in M. Feyertag’s treatise: intersection of performing and composing practice in the baroque age
The article deals with Moritz Feyertag’s treatise Syntaxis Minor zur Sing-Kunst (1695), which is littleknown in musicology. At the same time, it occupies an important place among the didactical works of Christoph Bernhard, Johann Christoph Stierlein, Wolfgang Michael Mylius, Wolfgang Kaspar Printz, Johann Georg Ahle and other German academics who deal with the issue of Italian vocal ornamentation. In the center of the article are two chapters on musical figures from Feyertag’s treatise. He refers to Mylius and Printz and teaches singers to improvise Manieren and techniques of diminution (among them accentus, circulo mezzo, esclamatio, groppo, tremolo, trillo and others). At the same time, Feyertag appears as an observant musician and theorist who has studied the use of Manieren in composer’s work, where they function as patterns fixed in scores. He clearly demonstrates this on the example of music by Karl Rosier, Gasparo Casati, Paolo Cornetti, Johann Havemann, Philipp Friedrich Buchner, Sebastian Anton Scherer and others. The author of the article aims to consider the oral-written status of musical ornaments at the turn of the 17th – 18th centuries based on the statements of Feyertag and his contemporaries, to understand the intersection of performing and composing practices. As a result, the author observes the requirement not to exceed the particular measure when using Manieren and methods of diminution; the prescription to coordinate embellishments with the meaning of individual words according to the tradition of imitazione delle parole; the tendency to the written fixation of embellishments, leading to further regulation of the musical text.
Key words
doctrines of musical figures, musical rhetoric, Manieren, vocal ornaments, Baroque, German treatises on music, Moritz Feyertag, Christoph Bernhard, Wolfgang Michael Mylius, Wolfgang Kaspar Printz.
For citation
Maltseva A. Musical figures in M. Feyertag’s treatise: intersection of performing and composing practice in the baroque age // South-Russian Musical Anthology. 2023. No. 2. Pp. 33-42.
