AMS Philadelphia 2009 Abstracts - American Musicological Society

36 Thursday afternoon AMS Philadelphia 2009
audiences’ shared memory of mourning by replicating particular features of state funerals,
as in Lully’s Alceste (1674) or Rameau’s Castor et Pollux (1637), with their elaborate pompes
funèbres. However, opera’s more profound engagement with contemporary mourning was
discursive, evident in basic artistic decisions concerning which deaths are mourned by opera’s
onstage communities, who should mourn, and how different groups of mourners should feel
and act.
While opera’s publics generally mourn in appropriate ways, lament tableaus also explore
the limits of contemporary mourning. Most scenes involve some tension between licit and
illicit mourning, and in the paper’s main section I examine two such scenarios. First, I analyze
the final tableau in Lully’s Atys (1676), in which a sub-group of the choral and dance corps,
the Phrygian “Corybantes,” mourns in ways that are musically and affectively extreme. Voicing
excessive grief lets the onstage community bear witness to the collective trauma of death,
while still preserving the decorum, and thus the organization, of the group. I then turn to
choral laments that elicit confessional monologues from protagonists, focusing on the dialogue
between Phèdre and the bereaved chorus in act 4 of Rameau’s Hippolyte et Aricie (1733).
In such scenes, choral mourning raises questions of responsibility for tragic events, which
culpable protagonists—almost always female—answer with confessions.
Opera’s exorbitant spectacles of grief and remorse recalled the actual chaos of public mourning
under the Old Regime, as well as state mechanisms for limiting its anarchic potential.
Mourning scenes generally conserve the political order staged in opera: both scenes analyzed
here aim at rehabilitating opera’s communities following a protagonist’s death, by restoring
the asymmetry of power that tragédies en musique took for granted.
Public participation, even when it was relatively passive, was integral to the political outcome
of state funerals, and this is one reason why opera’s mimicry of a mourning public
should be considered political representation. My analysis of the chorus’s role as a “public
witness” thus offers an alternative to the argument that this collective presence in opera does
not translate into a properly political community. This opens a more nuanced understanding
of the politics that tragédies en musique imagined.
“WE ARE THE SHEEP OF HIS PASTURE”: VIOLONS
EN BASSE AS THEOLOGICAL TOPIC
Deborah Kauffman
University of Northern Colorado
French composers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries made regular use of the accompanimental
technique of “violons en basse,” in which a high string part is used as the true
bass, thereby restricting the entire musical texture to the range of a violin or viola. Recent
research has shown how violons en basse in French Baroque opera represented a musical topic
that evoked a locus of associations around the pastoral. However, the technique was not used
solely in opera, but also in sacred music. In fact, the technique may have been first used in
sacred music; while violons en basse appear in operas quite frequently after 1700, it is found
regularly in sacred music in the 1680s and 90s.
An examination of the texts of a number of airs and choruses using violons en basse can
help to identify the associations called up by uses of this technique in sacred music. Topical
references in sacred works show some direct correlation with those in opera, most particularly
in connection with the pastoral. Other uses of violons en basse are clear depictions of