Two other couplets are of interest. In the sixth, a strongly formed rising line from ^5 appears. In the ninth, a rising figure in bars 5-6 is undercut by a thoroughly-prepared descending line from ^3 (as B5).
Saturday, January 21, 2017
Finger and Bingham, Airs anglois, part 3
Concluding the series of three posts, I look at the last of the 16 pieces by Godfrey Finger in George Bingham's collection 40 Airs Anglois. . . , published in Amsterdam, 1704-05: IMSLP link. The notation is by Hans-Thomas Müller-Schmidt.
The chaconne was a considerably more flexible compositional type in the seventeenth century than we generally assume based on the tiny sampling of still well-known compositions, such as "Dido's Lament" and the chaconne that ends Bach's D minor violin Partita. Even given that, Finger's chaconne in G major is an oddly constructed piece that consists of eleven eight-bar segments with a PAC to the tonic in every one. The bass of the first segment is never repeated, either literally or in varied form. Instead, at the opposite extreme, the bass line changes for every segment. The first three segments have repeat signs, and the effect at the beginning—as shown below—is that of a small binary form, especially because of the unstable bass at the beginning of the "B-section," across which a rising line is easily traced.
Two other couplets are of interest. In the sixth, a strongly formed rising line from ^5 appears. In the ninth, a rising figure in bars 5-6 is undercut by a thoroughly-prepared descending line from ^3 (as B5).
Two other couplets are of interest. In the sixth, a strongly formed rising line from ^5 appears. In the ninth, a rising figure in bars 5-6 is undercut by a thoroughly-prepared descending line from ^3 (as B5).
