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).

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.