Would Caccini approve?

Although it is known that improvisation was an important part of musical performance in the 16th and 17th centuries, studying how extemporaneous elements were incorporated into real-world situations has proven to be difficult. Improvisers, by nature, do not record what they do, but there is evidence that points to some of these individuals attempting to document their approach to music, namely in ornamentation manuals and individual pieces with written-out embellishment. Among these sources is British Library Ms. Egerton 2971, a 37-folio volume probably dating from the second or third decade of the 17th century, which contains, among other things, embellished versions of Giulio Caccini’s Amarilli, mia bella and Dolcissimo sospiro, first published in Le nuove musiche (Florence, 1602). Sources like this, despite some inherent problems, offer the clearest window into the minds of improvisers of the time, and warrant further study. The research in this article serves two purposes. First, the versions of Amarilli, mia bella and Dolcissimo sospiro contained in Egerton 2971 will be examined and compared to those published in Le nuove musiche as a case study of early 17th-century improvisation. Second, because of Caccini’s open disdain for singers taking liberties with his compositions, an attempt will be made to see if these pieces might be examples of such treatments. The crux of the article aims to show that ornamentation of the time, at least as shown in these examples, was not a random act of substituting stereotyped musical patterns for given intervals, but instead points to a more robust idea of improvisatory thought. Rather than looking at individual ornaments or how specific musical gestures might have painted certain words, the overall structure of the ornamentation is examined to show that it is subject to deeper and subtler intellectual considerations of poetic structure, overall musical structure, and rhetoric.