CHAPTER 43

Music in the Age of

Enlightenment: Keyboard Music

• In his Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith provides a seminal account of capitalism– an economic system in which the means of

production of goods are privately owned and bring wealth to private individuals.

• At this time, women of the growing middle-class had the opportunity for the first time to make music in the home.

• They did so with the keyboard– and composers quickly rushed to supply

music for this emerging amateur market.

To make keyboard music more accessible to the amateur keyboardist, composers developed several simple accompanied techniques such as:• Alberti bass, which imitates the triad by playing the notes successively• Murky bass, which provides a rumbling octave bass

• Pianoforte: invented in Florence around 1700 by Bartolomeo Cristoforo.

• The strings of the piano are not plucked, as those of the harpsichord, but stroked with a hammer that quickly retracts. For the first time a keyboard instrument could:

– Play all dynamic ranges from piano to forte (hence, pianoforte)

– An ampler range of articulations like staccato and legato.

• Domenico Scarlatti: the son of opera and cantata composer Alessandro Scarlatti– he became keyboardist to the king of Naples at the

age of 15.

• He then served as keyboardist and music teacher at the courts in Portugal and Madrid.

• Among his compositions, Essercizi probably served as exercises to develop specific keyboard skills.

• Hand-crossing: a keyboard technique in which the left hand continually crosses over the right to create a three-level texture. – it is one of the hallmarks of Scarlatti's style.

Acciaccatura: Italian for something battered and bruised.

Scarlatti famously makes use of acciaccatura in the form of crunching downbeat dissonances before the arrival of a new section.

This technique is derived from hearing dissonant chords strummed on a Spanish guitar.

Frederick the GreatKing of Prussia, he was an enlightened leader with strong interest in poetry and music. At his court he hosted French philosopher Voltaire, and composers Johann Quantz and C.P.E. Bach. Every evening he played flute sonatas and concertos for two hours.

• C.P.E. Bach, the second son of J.S. Bach, who worked at the court of king Frederick the Great in Berlin.

• Although he composed in all musical genres (except opera and Catholic Mass), music keyboard was at the heart of his creative work.

• As Quantz had done for the flute before him, C.P.E. wrote an influential instructional book for the keyboard titled, Essay on the True Art of Playing the Keyboard.

• Empfindsamer Stil (“expressive style”): a term applied to the hyper-expressivity that affected northern European arts in the second half of the 18th century. – C.P.E. Bach is also greatly associated with style of

music.

• Bebung: "quaking," a clavichord technique in which the performer holds and wiggles the key up and down to produce a vibrating sound.

• Fantasia: in the 18th century a rhapsodic, improvisatory work, often unbarred, in which the composers gives free reign the musical imagination – without concern for conventional musical forms.

The Piano Comes to England

• In 1750 the piano was virtually unknown in England– by 1800 it had almost completely replaced the

harpsichord.

• Square piano: a small box-shaped piano with strings running at right angles to the keys that could be placed on a table or a stand. – Johannes Zumpe began manufacturing these

popular diminutive pianos in the 1760s.

• Grand piano: originally called "grand" to distinguish it from Zumpe's small pianos.

• J.C. Bach: the youngest of J.S. Bach's sons, he first made a living composing operas in Italy and then moved to London, where he mostly wrote keyboard pieces. – He was also known as the “London” Bach.

• He was the first to publish keyboard sonatas that indicated the piano on their title page.

• His piano pieces, in galant style, are not technically difficult and appealed to amateurs.