Friday, January 20, 2017

Finger and Bingham, Airs anglois, part 2

Continuing the series of posts begun yesterday, I look at three more pieces by Godfrey Finger, from the collection 40 Airs Anglois. . .  by George Bingham (published in Amsterdam, 1704-05): IMSLP link. The  notation is by Hans-Thomas Müller-Schmidt, and I apologize for the artifacts I have introduced here and there.

The first section of an Allegro in F major is very close in its pitch design to the two Airs discussed yesterday, except that the priority obviously goes to the active lower voice, not the oft-repeated cover tone ^8 (as F5). As a result, it is quite easy to hear a simple rising line in the cadence.


If the Allegro resembles the two Airs from yesterday, Sybell is like Bingham's Jigg, the last example in the previous post. Here there is a nice balance between the initial A5 (the abstract ^2 of the Schenkerian interruption) and the rising line that moves from it to the main internal cadence.


Finally, one of several chaconnes and grounds offers a concise example of the effects of variation. One of the most straightforward, uncluttered octave lines I have ever seen sits above a Romanesca bass (not the descending tetrachord we usually, though not entirely correctly, associate with the chaconne). The first of seven couplets lifts the line up a third over the first five bars, then engages the C5 in bar 6, beat 3, and turns the line back up to close on F5. Note that an upper line is touched on -- neighbor Bb5 and A5 -- but would need an obviously lacking ^2 (as G5) to be anything more than a covering figure.