A PORTAL TO THE PAST

Geminiani’s scale exercises in his seminal 1751 treatise The Art of Playing on the Violin may look puzzlingly random to modern eyes, but violinist Benjamin Shute argues that they can reveal useful insights into the thinking behind performance practice of the time

A c.1735 portrait of Francesco Geminiani, formerly attributed to artist Andrea Soldi, from the collection of the Royal College of Music

Francesco Geminiani was one of the most celebrated violinist– composers of the first half of the 18th century and, in 1751, authored one of the period’s most influential string treatises, The Art of Playing on the Violin (which is readily accessible on websites including IMSLP).

Today, unfortunately, its wealth of information on historical performance practices is largely overshadowed by surprisingly long-burning controversies about a single infamous statement that ‘the close shake’, basically a vibrato ornament, ‘should be made use of as often as possible’. But I happily leave that conversation in the competent hands of others and turn instead to another fascinating facet of this treatise, the scale exercises in Essempio XIV.

We might initially be tempted to gloss over this section on the assumption, first, that it is merely concerned with technique building rather than historical performance practices and, secondly, that as a technique builder it is rather inferior to later, more comprehensive scale methods like those of Flesch (see opposite page), Galamian and Gilels. But a closer examination reveals that Essempio XIV, just as much as any other portion of Geminiani’s treatise, provides a fascinating portal not only to past practices but also to ways in which music itself was conceived historically, which will naturally have ramifications for how we approach and interpret the literature of his era today.

So, what is it about Geminiani’s scale system that can make it seem primitive compared with later methods? For one thing, he presents relatively few scales, representing relatively few keys. For another, none of the scale exercises extends higher than A6, and most top out at G6 or lower. By contrast, the modern norm is three-octave scales across all twelve pairs of major and minor keys, extending somewhere in the neighbourhood of an octave above the top of Geminiani’s range.

THE LANGUAGE OF THE LATE BAROQUE The more one looks at Geminiani’s set of scales, the more puzzling it may appear. His choice of keys seems somewhat arbitrary: they are, in order, G major, G minor, A minor, A major, B flat major, B minor, C major, C minor, C major again (!), D minor, D major, E minor, E major and E flat major. Even their arrangement seems a bit quirky: although generally presented in ascending order, E flat major comes after rather than before E; and major and minor scales that share a tonic are not consistently listed in the same order. Some, but not all, of the minor scales have a key signature that does not correspond to modern practice. And as to the content of the scale exercises, each one has its own unique pattern, with one fascinating exception, to which I will return later. In other words, there is scarcely any systematic repetition, which seems especially bizarre for an instruction manual, given how central systematic repetition of scale patterns is to modern technique formation.

Geminiani’s introduction to the scale exercises of Essempio XIV

D minor scale patterns as presented by Geminiani and Carl Flesch in his Skalensystem. Geminiani’s pattern is not strictly scalar, tops out at A6 rather than extending upwards to D7, and contains no flat in the key signature.

Having lived in the US for most of my life and recently settled in the UK, I have had to be aware of the dangers of thinking that we all speak the same language. And I think we face a similar danger in approaching Geminiani’s era. The language of the late Baroque can seem so familiar to us that we easily miss how significantly its theoretical underpinnings, pedagogical aims and technical norms differ from our own. But once this vast new horizon of historical perspective opens to us, not only do Geminiani’s choices make sense, but they also begin to reveal remarkable pedagogical intention realised with artistic panache.

TOPPING OUT IN SEVENTH POSITION

To contextualise Geminiani’s comparatively limited range on the fingerboard, we have to look near the beginning of the treatise, where he writes, ‘The Violin must be rested just below the Collar-bone’ (from the Preface, below). That is, Geminiani’s technique is one that does not employ the chin or even rest the violin on the shoulder, without which shifting above seventh position is hardly practical. This chin-off position also explains why Geminiani’s fingerings, seen in the image above, favour fewer but larger shifts, whereas Flesch, holding the violin securely with a chin rest (pioneered by Spohr around 1820), prefers smaller shifts even though it means that more of them are required.

We should also note that Geminiani’s hold of the violin, while typical of earlier generations, was no longer universal even in his own day: there are indications that other players held the violin directly under the chin, and some used the chin for stability. It would be highly challenging, for instance, to attempt Geminiani’s low hold in negotiating the capriccios from Locatelli’s L’arte del violino, which as early as 1733 extends up to a staggering D8, a tone higher than Paganini’s Caprices (composed the better part of a century later).

From the preface of Geminiani’s The Art of Playing on the Violin, advising how to hold the instrument

SCALE EXAMPLE BENJAMIN SHUTE

From a modern perspective, Geminiani’s technique might seem merely limited; but there are tonal and kinaesthetic considerations that could make one want to hold the violin in this position, if it were felt that its benefits outweighed the inability to go above sixth or seventh position. And for his technical set-up, Essempio XIV makes the fullest possible use of the fingerboard.

Of course, that serves the practical pedagogical purpose of training a student using his technique to negotiate the entirety of the usable fingerboard. But I think there is an additional takeaway for all of us: repertoires conceived for period instruments and performance practices generally make full and dramatic use of the resources available to them in ways that can be difficult to replicate on a modern instrument, which (apart from changes in tone, sound production, articulation and so forth) generally have an expanded range of pitch and volume.

The 14 scale exercises that comprise Essempio

XIV CREDIT

The problem is that the original extremities are no longer extremities, but the expanded extremities may not be aesthetically suitable for the repertoire. I don’t have a neat solution to the problem (beyond using period equipment!), but at least keeping the problem in mind can inform our interpretations, regardless of the instruments we use.

TONAL HIERARCHY IN SELECTION OF KEYS

One of the first things that is apparent about Geminiani’s choice of keys in Essempio XIV is that he generally favours those with simpler key signatures. That will seem restricted if we assume the modern norm of twelve equal and equally spaced semitones, and thus twelve equal major–minor key pairings. But lest we assume that this is objectively the best possible paradigm, we should remember that equally spaced semitones yield out-of-tune consonances: perfect 5ths are too narrow, whereas major 3rds, frustratingly, have the opposite problem of being too wide. Because Western music developed around the natural notes (with chromatic notes being exactly what the root chroma implies, a colouration rather than an autonomous entity), systems of fixed tuning emerged that favoured concentrating intervallic purity around the natural notes, which meant concentrating impurity elsewhere.

Accordingly, as the more modern concept of keys emerged from the modal practices of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, each key would have had a distinct tuning profile, becoming progressively ‘spicier’ the further one moved from the relative purity of C major. Into the 18th century, theorists considered that not all keys that might exist in theory were usable in practice. If a modern musician is tempted to see this as a limitation, a musician in Geminiani’s context might counter that our modern system has removed this perceived limitation by sacrificing the vibrant individuality of key profiles and precluding the purity that can be glimpsed in historical tunings.

The importance of tonal gravitation around the natural notes in historical music theories can hardly be overstated, but this isn’t just a theoretical concern: it affects us as performers in many ways, influencing how we interpret the emotional content of chromatic harmony, modulations and so forth. Geminiani might well have agreed, since several further aspects of his presentation of keys in Essempio XIV that initially appear quirky actually serve, on further examination, to underscore this gravitation around the natural notes.

Already with the second exercise, we notice that Geminiani’s key signature for G minor includes only a single flat, not the two flats of modern practice. This implies affinity with the Dorian mode, as indeed some theorists into the 18th century, like François Campion (Traité d’accompagnement et de composition, 1716), held that the minor scale is properly analogous to the Dorian (not the Aeolian) mode. This in itself upends many of our modern assumptions, even regarding concepts of relative major and minor keys – since, in this case, G minor shares a key signature not with B flat major but with F major! Looking ahead, we see that all of Geminiani’s minor scales in flat keys have one flat fewer than in today’s notation. We might naturally anticipate that minor keys with sharps will accordingly have one more sharp than in modern notation – but it is not so. To us, that might appear inconsistent, but it was common in the 17th and early 18th centuries: in a practice within which minor tonality could have tendencies recalling both Dorian and Aeolian modes, this particular treatment consistently favours the simpler key signature, specifying neither a lowered 6th in flat keys nor a raised 6th in sharp keys – which in turn seems to reflect the gravitation of the natural notes.

Similarly, when Geminiani presents both a major and minor scale that share a tonic, sometimes the major scale is given first, sometimes the minor. This appears inconsistent until we recognise that Geminiani is consistently prioritising the scale with the simpler key signature. And in the one case in which the two are equally chromatic – namely, G major with its single sharp and G minor with its single flat – the major scale is prioritised in accordance with the greater acoustic purity of the major 3rd.

GEMINI A NI STR IKINGLY INTRODUCES A SECOND C M AJOR EX ERCISE. IT’S PUZZLING, BUT HE’S CLEARLY DOING SOMETHING

A SURPRISING REPETITION

The one place where this principle breaks is when Geminiani strikingly introduces a second C major exercise, not adjacent to the first but after the C minor. It’s puzzling, but he’s clearly doing something. It seems hardly accidental that the only key to appear twice is the pure key of C major, which could imply that the purpose is to emphasise the primacy of C major. Why would this second C major exercise appear after C minor instead of adjacent to the first? Flanking C minor creates a symmetrical structure that seems to subordinate C minor between two pillars of C major. And if this C–c–C structure serves to emphasise the tonal centrality of C major, it may not be accidental that it appears at the structural centre of Essempio XIV – or, at least, as close to the centre as possible: it is preceded by six keys and followed by five.

Title page of Geminiani’s The Art of Playing on the Violin

But if Geminiani is so concerned to represent the tonal gravitation of the natural notes, why would he include E major, with its four sharps, but not F sharp minor, which has only three? This question leads us still deeper into important but now largely forgotten historical paradigms.

THE HEXACHORD: A NOT-YET-EXTINCT DINOSAUR

While medieval and Renaissance theory understood the properties of melodies according to mode (Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian and so on), another theoretical system arose concurrently in the eleventh century that was designed primarily to aid in learning and memorising music. That system was solmisation, the precursor of modern solfège, but with crucial differences. In medieval solmisation, the syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol and la form a hexachord (hexa = six, chord = note) that can start from three different points, C, F or G (the natural, soft and hard hexachords, respectively; see example 1). The critical element is that the half-step is always between the bright-vowelled mi and the dark-vowelled fa. It was also possible in this system to append a half-step above la, which, because fa must always be the upper boundary of a half-step, was called fa sopra la (fa above la).

EXAMPLE 1 Natural, soft and hard hexachords: six-note scales starting on C, F and G respectively

This may sound arcane, but the hexachord’s influence stretched, surprisingly, into Geminiani’s day. Bach himself, on the title page of The Well-Tempered Clavier, describes keys in hexachordal terms – major as ut, re, mi and minor as re, mi, fa; and atop the 1749 ‘Faber’ Canon BWV1078 he writes the motto Fa Mi, et Mi Fa est tota Musica (‘Fa Mi and Mi Fa is the totality of music’). Hexachordal thinking seems also to have influenced theories of which keys are considered usable. For instance, the keys Friedrich Erhard Niedt (1674–1717) lists as usable in his Musicalische Handleitung, vol.1 (1700/10) are those whose tonics lie within the system of hexachords. For the most part, this coincides with keys with simpler key signatures, but not always, and that is the quirk that reveals its apparent hexachordal framework. For example, B major and B flat minor are included, but other less chromatic keys whose tonics lie outside the hexachordal system are omitted. Niedt assuredly could have determined usable keys simply by the number of sharps or flats in the key signature; but apparently he considered something about the hexachordal system to be sufficiently foundational to the working of music that it should be embedded in the very framework of keys as he conceived and taught them.

HEXACHORD DIAGRAM BENJAMIN SHUTE COULD THE OMISSION OF F M AJOR HAVE BEEN A QUIRK OF THE T YPESETTING AND PR INTING PROCESS?

A MISSING KEY?

Similar thinking could explain why Geminiani includes E major and A major but not C sharp minor or F sharp minor. The omission of any key on F, and especially F major, is admittedly bewildering, and not only from a hexachordal perspective. In fact, I suspect that the omission might not have been intended, on three grounds. First, there’s the simple prominence of F major in both theory and practice. Secondly, by Geminiani’s ordering, F major would appear after those already given, but the scales on E and E flat already bring us to the bottom of a page, with Essempio XV beginning at the top of the next one. Could the omission of F major have been a quirk of the typesetting and printing process? And finally, as noted above, the symmetrical C–c–C unit that seems to emphasise the tonal centrality of C major also falls as nearly as possible at the centre of Essempio XIV, preceded by six keys and followed by five. Had F major been included, the structure would have been perfectly symmetrical: as it is, the structure appears to be begging for a symmetry which it almost, but not quite, has.

In any case, hexachordal thinking could also explain why Geminiani includes E flat major but presents it after E major (whereas all other scales are in ascending order): namely, because E flat major belongs only tangentially to the hexachordal system as the appended fa above la of the hexachord on F. As noted above, each scale exercise has its own unique pattern, with one exception: that exception is E flat major, which takes its pattern exactly from the E major exercise that precedes it. By presenting E flat major after rather than before the exercises on E, and by denying it its own pattern, the implication is that E flat is merely a chromatic subsidiary of E.

HISTORICAL PEDAGOGY

This raises the final potentially puzzling point, namely, the lack of systematic repetition that is so central to modern scale studies. But this, too, is in keeping with 18th-century pedagogical norms. Whereas the later conservatoire paradigm has focused on training performers by repetition and reproduction, 18th-century pedagogy tended to focus on competency in more holistic music making, in which the roles of composer and performer were not so neatly separable. Hence exercises very often took the form not of repetitive drills but of pieces of music designed to build both compositional and instrumental competence. The Art of Playing on the Violin itself contains many exercises in the form of pieces of music accompanied by a figured bass. The intention behind Essempio XIV, then, seems not to be to train the student to reproduce patterns so much as to instil flexibility for performance and improvisation. At the same time, the student is immersed in broader systems of tonal organisation and also furnished with an elegant example of musical architecture by virtue of how Geminiani has structured the whole.