For my second big crossover collage, I went for a more complex arrangement of the XVIII century Fandango. I chose Boccherini´s Fandango from his quintet G.448 and set it for Cembalo obligato, Baroque Guitar, Bass, Violin, and Percussion. I created a contrasting improvisation middle section with a Colombian Fandango-Ground called "Guabina". Preludes and bridges were added as well.
SURVIVING ELEMENTS OF XVIII CENTURY PERFORMANCE PRACTICE IN "EL FANDANGUITO"
The version of "El Fandanguito" by Heliodoro Copado (the founding member of "Los Camperos de Valles") required a whole analysis by itself. I could identify parallelisms with historical ornamentation, specifically with French baroque-dance ornamentation of the XVIII century as well as common elements regarding the so-called "Tempo-rubato", as described in historical sources of the XIX century.
Copado´s "El Fandanguito" is full of temperament and is floridly embellished. I transcribed the solo-ritornellos trying to reach the most exact notation. By using applications to slow down the speed of the recording, I tried to produce a text that would most accurately reflect the complexity of ornamentation, rhythmic variety, rubato, and intonation.
Making this transcription and analyzing this recording was one of the most enlighting experiences in my research. As historically informed violinists, we are trained to reconstruct these performance elements from written sources, however, through this exercise, I experience for the first time the "opposite process", coming across the difficulties of notation by myself.
ORNAMENTATION
There is a big presence of grace notes and trills, which reinforce the rhythmic character of the violin line, as found in quick French dances from the XVIII century. All of the grace notes are executed quickly, with a smaller value than the main note (historical performers would call this "Lombardic" rhythm, as in XVIII music resembling northern Italian style). There was a big amount of grace notes recalling the "tierce coulé" found in French music from the XVIII century, that is, an ornament filling in an interval of a third.
In the recording of "El Fandanguito", there was a fluidity between all of these ornaments and their main notes so it was sometimes very difficult to discern one from the other. It was almost impossible to distinguish a trill from a quick grace note, and most notably, a tierce coulé from a regular sixteenth note. It became evident to me, that the definition of an ornament is an editorial question. it was a decision I had to make only due to the fact that I was writing this melody down. I strongly believe this principle of fluidity applies to baroque dance music the other way around, thus written baroque dance ornaments should be performed with the same flexibility and exchanged freely.
Understanding this flexibility helped me to make the idea of ornamentation more natural, intuitive, and permissive. It opened my mind and changed my feeling when performing ornaments. It was especially interesting to find further parallelisms between baroque and folklore regarding the fluidity between ornaments and even the coexistence of different ornaments at the same time known as heterophony. While in folklore two instruments play the very same line freely ornamented in baroque music we still have the feeling of restriction imposed by our beautifully trained ears. However, historical sources often show us confusing information regarding ornamentation markings, suggesting that the performance might have been quite "flexible" in this regard. During a rehearsal of Francesco Geminiani´s Enchanted Forest at the conservatory, we had the "trouble" of playing from the first edition (1761). The parts were richly ornamented, showing port de voix, messa di voce, grace notes and several types of trills involving different apoyaturas, "point de arret" and resolutions the problem was that every line had different ornaments, with different ornaments for the same line in its Solo as well as in the Rippieno version. It took an enormous amount of time (5 days) to unify ornamentation. However, we know, the musicians who might have performed this music didnt have much time to rehearse, but rather read through the music, as there are not even bar numbers. We must conlcude that the this performance was heterophonic.
Copado´s ornamentation is thick, mottled, and excessive... It is baroque in the deepest sense of the word. I consider his playing to be a living example of how highly ornamented violin playing might have sounded in the XVIII century (particularly in relation to dance music). A performer confronted with French dance sources from the XVIII century could perfectly deliver a similar amount of ornamentation. This fuzzy "cloud of sounds" produces a similar impression to the one produced by the performance of highly detailed French sources, such as Couperin´s Concert Royaux:
The collage begins with a prelude inspired on a prelude by the Joropo-Group "Cimarrón". The figuration from the beginning is taken from the Bandola player of the group at the beginning of a Colombo-Venezuelan Fandango-Song called "Pajarillo". You can listen to the source by clicking here. Afterward, there is a percussive section inspired by the signature bow strokes of Venezuelan Violinist Alexis Cardenas. The figuration at the last two bars of the prelude is taken straight from a Sonata by Johann Sebastian Bach (BWV 1003/1). The score of the prelude is to be found above on the right.
The arrangement of Boccherini´s Fandango has a completely different instrumentation than the original, so it turned into an instrumentation exercise. The idea was to create an obligato-cembalo part that resembled the role of the baroque obligato cembalo pieces. The right hand had a melodic role, often taking over the second violin part, contesting to the first violin or doubling it creating a "tutti" sort of "rippieno" sound. As a help I studied the arrangement made by Andreas Staier of the same Fandango for 2 keyboards. The score of the original Fandango by Boccherini and my arrangement can be consulted on the right.
RUBATO
The most distinctive feature of Copado´s playing is his rubato. Since the dance doesn't allow any bigger tempo fluctuations, he obtains his characteristic lively playing by exploiting the freedom within the beat with complete mastery. This type of tempo modification over a steady beat was called tempo rubato, and was regarded by many authors XVIII century "as the principal legitimate method of bending the tempo" according to Clive Brown. It was a form of embellishment expected in the performance of any sensitive musician, and occurred, "when the accompaniment (or in the case of a keyboard instrument usually the left hand) remains steady, while the melodic line is modified for a more or less extended passagex" (Brown 1999, 396). Something like this can be observed in early XX ceuntry recordings of violinists who´s performance traditions come from XIX century, such as Manuel Quiroga or Pablo de Sarasate. Here an example of such rhythmically embelished playing on a "Jota" (spanish Fandango) by the first.
In Copado we can observe the most radical reorganization of the note values. He redistributes the accentuation and adds rhythmically free embellishment, spreading the notes around the beat in every way. He often anticipates the starting note of a bar by an eight note, in something that we could identify as a sort of XVII century "anticipazione della nota".
It was very entertaining to try to capture the rhythmic ambiguity of his playing. My goal was to force the music-writing software to produce an accurate midi-reproduction of Copado´s rubato. Although I tried using the most detailed notation and breaking the rhythm to irrational values, it proved impossible to write down some places of special freedom (particularly the rubato starting at bar 142). Through this "failure," It became clear to me that this type of exact notation did not make any sense (apart from its musicological value).
The rubato shown above seems to match the following description by Clive Brown:
"But tempo rubato seems often to have been understood to mean a more radical reorganization of the note values, a redistribution of accentuation, or even the addition of rhythmically free embellishment, any of which could be introduced in particular passages as a special effect." (Brown 1999, 396)
Rubato, as well as the grace notes described above, represents a variation or ornamentation of an "original" melody, thus, If anything should be written down, was that abstract, unornamented line and not its deviation. But how to talk about an "original" melody when it comes to unwritten music? The perspective of ornamentation has been studied by my colleague Galel Sanchez in his Master-Dissertation:. In his chapter about ornamentation, he states:
"Our hypothesis, then, is that there are 'simple' versions of the son melodies, not consensually established among the community of musicians, but rather preserved more or less intact in the oral tradition. Often these melodies are kept in the popular memory in a version hidden by a certain number of ornaments, to which the musicians will add others." (Sanchez 2022, 77)
I tried then to produce an "unornamented version" out of the version in exact notation by reducing the writing to a couple of structural melodic elements (below). The result resembled pretty much the form of notation in which baroque dances have been preserved in written sources from the XVII and XVIII centuries. One might wonder if these "abstract melodies" were ever to be heard in their plain versions.
INTONATION
In the recording by Heliodoro Copado we can notice a strong ambiguity in intonation, especially regarding the definition of the third, sixth, and seventh degrees of the scale. The third degree, (which in functional harmony corresponds to the third of a tonic chord) is consistently placed between B natural and B flat, regardless of the underlying accompaniment. To our tonal ears, this produces the harmonic impression of a simultaneous “minor-mayor” tónica chord discussed earlier as typical of the renaissance-derived instruments of the Caribbean ternary metered repertoire (García de León 2002, 113). The sixth degree is consistently placed between E and E flat, creating the impression of a "meantone" e-flat. The same happened with the seventh degree (F sharp) which was consistently placed lower. This particular tuning brings gives the sound a colorful effect resembling that of meantone tunings. More sources should be consulted to form a judgment on the subject.
In the next chapter, I will go into detail about the historical French bow-grip as found in the performance of the first version of "El Fandanguito" in chapter 2.2.
The arrangement has several spots where every performer is encouraged to make simple improvisations, wether as solos or bridges. In the middle of the Fandango (bar 79 of the score), the Colombian "Guabina" sets in. You can hear a traditional version of the song here. My improvisation on the violin is taken from the bowing patterns discussed in the following chapter of this research, derived from the strumming patterns of Huapango-guitars. A guide for the strumming is to be found on the right.
A more detailed study of ornamentation in Huapango can be found in Sanchez´dissertation. To the right there is a reproduction of an ornamentation "chart" made out of several versions of the Huapango song "El llorar" taken from the most relevant audio-sources, including the recordings by the Institute of Anthropology and History of Mexico and Los Camperos de Valles (Sanchez 2022, 118)
