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Scholars working on French keyboard music from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries have been strongly aware of the close connection between music and language. By mapping linguistic ideas to musical thoughts, this study identifies the origins of this connection and traces how stylistic changes and performance attitudes were influenced by linguistic concepts. During the seventeenth century, in both musical and linguistic realms, an awareness of a certain weakness in existing language led to attempts to purify it. From the 1650s, the desire for logic, clarity, and order also shaped the development of French keyboard music and propelled the rationalization of usage in music. This development paralleled, to a certain extent, the codification of the French language. In both cases, such classification was, however, only partial. By resorting to the notion of le bon goût, musicians silently confessed to the greater variety that took place in practical music-making when compared to theoretical rules. An enriched understanding of le bon goût within a broader cultural context refines our approach to performing this music. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores the unique dramatic rapport between the voice and the instrumental accompaniment — either as obbligato instruments or as a simple continuo line — in select examples of early 18th-century French cantatas. Through examples by Campra, Morin, Bernier and Montéclair, it presents a taxonomy of the different types of dramatic interaction by looking primarily at recitatives. The study shows that composers turned instrumental music into an essential part of the drama by legitimizing its presence either as a diegetic occurrence, a representation of sound — musical, human or otherwise — heard by the singer or as an external manifestation of the singer’s inner self. In its most basic form, the interaction between singer and instrumental music helps the listener envision the dramatic action, as in Campra’s La dispute de l’Amour et de l’Hymen, where the sound of a bourrée gradually interrupting Venus’s sleep heralds the arrival of Love and Hymen. Another type involves the representation of imagined sound, as in Morin’s Le naufrage d’Ulisse , where brief interjections of the storm interrupt the singer as if materializing from his narration of past events. Composers sometimes turned mimesis into diegesis as in Montéclair’s Le dépit généreux, where a descending chromatic bass depicting the singer’s urge to weep becomes his real weeping in the following aria, or in Bernier’s L’amour vainqueur, where the instrumental interjections first represent the singer’s attempts to burst into song, then represent actual singing when they turn into the ritornello of the following aria. More overtly theatrical interactions between singer and instruments can be found in Montéclair’s Le retour de la paix, where the ‘fight’ between violins and singer is an allegory of war, and in Campra’s Le Jaloux where the singer engages in a dramatic tête-à-tête with the violins, whose sound becomes a dramatic interlocutor for the singer throughout the entire piece. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]