Part 2: Advice for Foreign Musicians & The Structure of Baroque Music

 

KY:  French influences can be found in many baroque works. Do you think it is important for baroque musicians to study French Baroque music in depth? 

 

BD: Yes, I think you cannot perform Baroque music well without having an overview of French Baroque. Especially for flute players, harpsichord players, and viola da gamba players, because French music is foundational repertoire for these instruments. 

 

However you can only learn this music a little bit later. Because when you begin to interpret the music, you must have a clear structure to know that usually main beats are more important than the upbeats. This is our foundational understanding.  But then you can go to French music and think, "Ah, in fact, in this music, the upbeats are more important." 

 

To be honest, for the technique for singers and for a lot of instrumentalists, French music is not very good. Because you have a lot of appoggiaturas, you have this inégalité, a lot of things which make this music very nice, but not very strict regarding the rhythm, regarding the line, regarding the fluidity. This can create tension for the singers. To make all these appoggiaturas, these ports de voix everywhere, you can do it very well without breaking your voice only if you are very well trained before. So, I really suggest to everybody to work first on Haydn, Mozart, and then Vivaldi. Later, you can work on more complicated things like Bach, which is a whole specific world, and French music, which is also its own specific world.

 

KY: It’s fascinating that there are such significant differences of musical style between European countries which are so geographically close! How would you sum up some of the key differences?

 

In France, our music is rarely pure music. In our music, we like text, dance, and theatre. If you take Rameau, it's only this. A tempest(7.38) is just theatre. An aria is just text. And a gavotte is just dance. 

 

We want everything to be short, very efficient (I think he says ‘episode’ – i.e. episodic?), very poetic, very linked with the ace. That's why all the pieces by Couperin have titles, because all are an evocation of someone or something. Or they give an atmosphere. 

 

In France, we don't like pieces to be so long, so developed, and so complicated. We like when it's short. An aria by Rameau is two minutes. An aria by Vivaldi can be eight minutes.

 

But in Germany it is the opposite! Their music is quite intellectual and written purely for the beauty of the music. We can find these big symphonies or all these fugues in sacred music. They put their brain first. They want complicated music, complicated harmony, and it's pure theory, but it's super nice.  

 

In Italy, the composers wanted to showcase virtuosity. They wanted to show the music is complicated. In France, we hate to show that it's complicated, and we hate when music is purely intellectual. So the essence of the musical styles are totally different