Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music by McClary Susan

Author:McClary, Susan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520952065
Publisher: University of California Press

EX. 6.5. Frescobaldi, Missa degli Apostoli, Elevation Toccata, mm. 1–14.

And what about the descending lines that allowed us to keep track of the generating logic in the other two Frescobaldi toccatas? These too weave tangled webs. The soprano in the Apostoli elevation toccata opens up the Phrygian diatessaron, thus demanding a descent from E. It makes its way down as far as A before breaking off (as does the alto with B in its descent in m. 4). If we were to follow the tenor, we might hear it valiantly attempting to construe a responsible Phrygian: its opening gambit establishes the high E before it moves on to circumscribe with both upper and lower auxiliaries B, the fifth degree; next it catches up with the missed notes—D and C—then makes it as far as the F that sounded so puzzling just as a harmonic function. But if F has a place of honor within E major or minor, it does not belong to Phrygian.

From every point of view m. 5 represents a cul-de-sac. As if starting all over, the soprano picks up a new opening gesture; but, unlike the parallel moments in Toccata Sesta, which always reaffirmed E, the Apostoli toccata chooses to begin its oratorical pronouncement on D, seemingly operating within G. Until, that is, the deceptive would-be arrival in m. 6, in which E in the bass and G in the soprano reorient the piece toward A—or (why not?) again toward the oddly configured E that can neither establish itself nor surrender to any other key. For the prepared A is not allowed to solidify in m. 7, hindered as it is by a deceptive harmonization and a quick swerve to the flat side, the B that clearly serves here as a lowered auxiliary to the fifth degree in D.

And so it goes for the duration of the toccata. Inchoate desires emerge, intensify, deflate, and find themselves replaced by yet other impulses. Only very occasionally does a configuration suggesting E Phrygian materialize—for instance, in mm. 14–15, the beginning of m. 21, and the bold outline in the bass from m. 30 to the end. Like the Toccata Sesta, the Apostoli toccata concludes with its opening sonority. But the former composition pursued a dramatic process in which repeated attempts at descending from E all culminate equivocally on G. The elevation toccata presents no such process. Instead, it is as though the opening sonority itself stands as an enigma: “behold, I tell you a mystery.” Over the course of the piece the gestures of human desire attempt to grasp the incomprehensible fact of transubstantiation, of a Phrygian entity with a signed-in G. But the mystery remains intact, still unfathomable at the end, unchanging yet containing within itself miraculously transformative powers.

The first three toccatas discussed in this chapter strained belief by elongating each moment of an explicit or implicit credo. Armed with the cultural knowledge contemporaries would have brought to these pieces—the psalm tones they recited endlessly at liturgical services, the

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