Great, clear exposition of Muffat. Its interesting how influential those French orchestral rules have been for baroque players of the past 50 (!) years and how little we've paid attention to what Muffat says the Germans and Italians did.
Muffat's rules for bowing give great direction as to the articulation & accent & thereby allowing us today to recreate what the music actually did sound like as opposed to how modern orchestras have negated these aspects. It also, for me as a keyboard player, indicates the way the notes & phrases should be approached. Thanks for this video!
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I really like this video because it can be fantastic for people learning the Violin. This is because with each piece of music being on screen while the performer plays, you can observe the bow stroke divisions for the notes. And whether to go up bow or down bow on certain notes in music may teach people about how the bow can be used to create "accents" on the strongest beats.
It is fascinanting how Quantz and Tromlitz, decades after Muffat, would apply rules so closely related to Muffat's with regards to articulation on the flute.
Muffat's rules still work well for modern dance fiddling! Great video, and thanks for the link to IU Press! I found several books in addition to the Muffat volume that I'm interested in...
As a Baroque music lover, Vivaldi or Bach would approve of David Wilson's excellent bowing explanation. Being a novice myself, I am starting to learn more about bowing technique and how Baroque v Classical or Romantic differ. Thank you David Wilson. Tres bon.
Sorry for my inadequate English. Do we know for sure that Bach would have supported Georg Muffat's rules? And Voices of Music, thank you so much for answer our questions!
There must have been some bowing rules for Bach and most other composers, since performers didn't write in the bowings. There's no reason to think these rules were very different for Bach, but by the end of the baroque period you start to see some comments by players wanting more freedom in the bowing. Since the bowings aren't marked in, we don't really know the exact bowings that were used. Some groups use Muffat's rules for most of the repertory, other groups do not. However, many groups add extensive markings to the music which you don't see in the baroque, and that argues in favor of some sort of system or tradition.
Baroque music is dancing and singing. Muffat learned the bowings from Lullys orchestra, so we shold use them for all dance music in French style. More important as the bowings is the sound that came to the audience. A singer is to be imitated. How that works on baroque violin bowings you can see in the notes of any baroque composer. There is no written rules, there can't be any. It is a matter of good taste. Good taste is the taste of the auditors. They paid for it. @@VoicesofMusic
So are these rules also applicable to German and Italian music, or only French? Would, say, Corelli's sonatas or Telemann's fantasias benefit from the application of these rules?
Thank you so much for this explanation! After desperate looking for information on the subject - so concise and short! Thank you! So how did actually German and Italian baroque players synchronize their bowings???
As a none string player this has been extremely enlightening. Puts me in mind about the baroque French organ rules. Would German/Italian bowing traditions have been performed as alternate bowing (up/down/up/down) or would there be some variations?
So they're not really rules then? More like guidelines. Not to be semantic about it, but there's so much confusion (which I think is partly deliberate) when it comes to conversation about how to play music in the western classical sphere (anything from medieval to romantic music) with "rules" in mind. I'm personally sick of the confusion that still happens now considering this is almost 8 years old.
A set of rules is a like a grammar book, you learn that, and, then, if you choose, you may make your own rules to create literature or poetry. If you are playing baroque music, learning Muffat's rules will not take long and it's valuable skill.
