Elam Rotem

• In this work, Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s musical sources will serve as a platform in an attempt to overcome the lack of explicit original guidance and guidelines of performance practice of early basso continuo. It will offer a methodology that will allow the unraveling of implicit theory and practice hidden in the music sources themselves. The methodology of this work is based on the fact that Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di Anima e di Corpo (Rome, 1600) is printed using a unique continuo notation, which is detailed, precise, and coherent—more soIn this work, Emilio de’ Cavalieri’s musical sources will serve as a platform in an attempt to overcome the lack of explicit original guidance and guidelines of performance practice of early basso continuo. It will offer a methodology that will allow the unraveling of implicit theory and practice hidden in the music sources themselves. The methodology of this work is based on the fact that Cavalieri’s Rappresentatione di Anima e di Corpo (Rome, 1600) is printed using a unique continuo notation, which is detailed, precise, and coherent—more so than any other contemporaneous printed source. Through thorough investigation of this continuo notation, it will be possible to enrich our practical as well as theoretical knowledge of the early basso continuo. A wide range of evidences will emerge, covering a wide spectrum, from general questions of instrumentation up to the very notes that should be played. Using a special notation for illustration, I will demonstrate how Cavalieri’s basso continuo figuration, when combined with the known rules of counterpoint, is at times equivalent to written-out realizations. As part of this study, different models of contrapuntal phenomena will be analyzed, mainly in the context of cadences but also in the context of other progressions that deserve to be recognized as formulas. Their theoretical structure will be uncovered as well as their actual application in music and their manner of execution. The prevalence of each phenomenon will be examined in order to distinguish common and recurrent phenomena from rarely-used formulas. In order to do this, and due to problematic historical terminology, it will be necessary to create a set of new terms inspired by Cavalieri’s notation. Those terms will not be solely relevant to Cavalieri’s music; the models were made flexible so that they may prove useful for future discussions or studies of early continuo in general. Out of the known early basso continuo sources, a “mini-compendium” of practical implications will be extracted in order to exhaust the practical knowledge implicit in them. This endeavor will be concluded with a list of rules and general advice drawn from the sources, but it will also reveal some problematic aspects of these sources. This endeavor will make it possible to compare the “new” implicit practical information deduced in this study with the explicit known continuo sources, and assess to what extant Cavalieri’s continuo practices illuminate and complement the known knowledge from previously-studied yet opaque sources of basso continuo. The focus of this dissertation is on Cavalieri’s music, but the findings proposed here will be traced so as to illuminate the broader realm of the early Baroque and the 17th century musical style at large. Finally, this new research about Cavalieri’s music and continuo, along reevaluating of its place among the common continuo sources, calls for redistribution of source materials on the traditional “shelf” of early basso continuo sources.…
• Frühe Basso Continuo-Praxis: Implizite Evidenz in der Musik Emilio de' Cavalieris