Viola da Gamba Tutorial No. 16: French Ornaments Pt. IV - The Port-de-voix

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Welcome to gamba tutorial no. 16. This is the fourth in my sub-series of videos focusing on the basics of French Baroque ornamentation. In this part, I talk about the port de voix or appoggiatura. Because there are various approaches to its performance, I've organised the video into two halves - the basic approach and the more in-depth approach.

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Very interesting ! Thank yo so much !!

eolianflute
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To my mind, it is pretty non-sensical to refer to Quantz for French ornamental practice, even for 18th century baroque music. I have never come across any French treatise that says one should "lean on", or otherwise accent, the petite note. Many modern authors equate the port de voix with the appoggiatura - I think that is fundamentally wrong even in the case of on-beam port de voix. Just because they look similar on the page doesn't mean they have the same function or execution. The word "port" could perhaps be translated as "carry" - i.e. it serves to carry the voice into the main note. It is quite the opposite to "appoggiatura". My view is that the function of the port de voix is predominantly melodic (unlike the appoggiatura), and stays essentially unchanged through the turn of the century, even though the execution changed, as otherwise the later composers would have picked a different name for the ornament. It should be unaccented in both the pre-beat and on-beat version, and in the on-beat version it should take significantly less than half the written duration of the main note. In the version that straddles the beat (the Bacilly type) where the ornament note is longer, the accent is still avoided by playing it pre-beat.

But thank you for dedicating half of this video on the pre-beat port de voix. The early music world seems to be strongly driven by conformity, and virtually no one ever plays pre-beat. I don't think a lot of musicians "get it". The pre-beat port de voix feels very alien at first and is, in my experience, technically harder to execute than the on-beat version. But I think once you "get it", it feels natural and you start to see all sorts of places where you might add one in. Ports de voix that used to feel awkward, those that you play only because the composer specified them, suddenly make sense when you play them pre-beat. And once you know how a port de voix should feel, I think it becomes quite clear that even the on-beat version has absolutely nothing to do with the appoggiatura, certainly not until Haydn became fashionable in France.

cliveso