Musical Marginalia
New York ensemble Sonnambula expands the classical music canon for 21st century
By Ana Sorrentino
On Jan. 5, 1711, in the north of France, a singer from King Louis XIV’s court named Louise Couperin sang two songs at a young prince’s dinner.
That is nearly everything we know about the evening. We don’t know the room, the guest list, or whether the boy at the head of the table, three days shy of his fourth birthday, even looked up from his plate. What we do have is a handwritten note, added sometime later to a copy of a very small book. The note says the songs were received with applause.
It also tells us who wrote the music: Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre (1665-1729) one of few women known to have composed in France during the reign of Louis XIV, who herself played for the king when she was only five.
Then the applause stopped. For more than three centuries, the songs slept in the stacks, bound inside a book so small it could pass for a prayer book.
On Nov. 19, in St. Paul’s Chapel, Sonnambula, a New York early-music ensemble, will sing them again.
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They’ll be led by Elizabeth Weinfield, a professor of musicology at The Juilliard School and the director of Sonnambula, an ensemble dedicated to playing lesser-known late Renaissance and early baroque repertoire. Most of what Weinfield selects is unfamiliar even to most people who spend their lives performing in concert halls. The group’s work sits somewhere between historiography and performance, determined to bring “obscure stories” back into the world by reviving older and overlooked composers.
Weinfield founded Sonnambula in 2011, after hearing the viola da gamba, a bowed string instrument popular in the 16th and 17th centuries, for the first time. “I started integrating myself into the small world of people who play this instrument,” she said. The group members met at a viola da gamba masterclass and stayed late afterward, simply to keep making music. The gamba remains at the core of Sonnambula’s sound, alongside two violinists who give the group the flexibility to travel across repertoires.
The ensemble’s name reflects their revival of long-lost repertoire. The name Sonnambula is Italian for “sleepwalker,” an unlikely choice for a group devoted to reawakening forgotten music. But a sleepwalker exists in the limbo state between waking and sleeping. So, in a sense, says Weinfield, does the fantasia, a popular 17th-century musical form that is “improvisatory in nature” while remaining fully composed. The music Sonnambula plays isn’t necessarily improvised, but their name alludes to their desire to preserve spontaneous sentiments in each performance.
The group’s philosophy reaches past the way Sonnambula plays and into the deeper question of what music deserves to be heard at all. “Even within Baroque music, we have our canons, our great composers, our most talked about and most programmed composers,” Weinfield says. “And then we have, as it were, peripheral composers, who are often women or people of color.”
Jacquet de La Guerre, Weinfield argues, is a unique case. “There is this double minority quality,” referring to Jacquet de La Guerre’s status as a woman and baroque composer. “One of my main challenges as a historian and performer is closing the gap between obscured people in history, even those with rich archival presence and a public who doesn’t yet know what they are missing.” One of the few female French composers of her time, Jacquet de La Guerre embodies Sonnambula’s mission. Historians have scraps from her life: harpsichord pieces published under royal privilege in 1687, an opera, Céphale et Procris, staged in Paris in 1694, and an appearance before the king at age five. Outside of these fragments, her life is largely lost to history. The popular version of her life—that she remained devoted to the king even after he eventually fell out of favor—is a good story. Weinfield stresses that it is also conjecture. What is certain is that a woman of extraordinary talent made her way through a court where power ran almost entirely through men.
A book containing four airs (French for song) by Jacquet De Le Guerre arrived at the Morgan Library a few years ago, at which point the Library’s archivist, Robinson McClellan contacted Weinfield. After intensive research, Weinfield found that only eleven copies are now known to survive, scattered from Paris to Princeton, Harvard, Yale, Kentucky and the Morgan. The composer’s complete catalogue, such as the kind that exists for Beethoven, lists these songs, but the secondary literature barely mentions them.“For all intents and purposes,” Weinfield notes, “no one knows that they exist except for a few specialists.”
The printed book is so small it would never sit comfortably on a music stand, and its pages turn at the worst moments, in the middle of a phrase. Whether anyone actually ever sang from the print, no one can say. But soprano Chloe Holgate—who will join Sonnambula on Nov. 19th—finally will, performing four songs, also called “airs.”
Each air is scored for only two lines: a vocal line and a bassline, with small numbers written beneath the bass notes, called figures. In Baroque music, “figured bass” was shorthand, telling a keyboard player which harmonies to fill in. The composer supplied the skeleton, and the musicians built the body.
When asked how Somnambula approaches music with no performance record, Weinfield says the old impulse to “strip away all editorialisms,” has given way to something different. Inspired by former Columbia professor Richard Taruskin, she remains deeply informed by history, but calls the quest for authenticity foolish: “We live in our time and only our time.”
Sonnambula will be guided by the past without trying to recreate it. The airs are short and compact, Weinfield says. The group could play exactly what is on the page “and be done in two minutes,” but they won’t. “We’re going to infuse them with dynamics. We’re going to give them more of a narrative arc, maybe have a bassline riff before the voice enters. Musicians experimented 300 years ago with musical rhetoric and so will we.”
When these airs are finally performed, St. Paul’s Chapel will be carried back in time to the 18th-century French court. Alongside the airs, the program will feature Jacquet de La Guerre’s contemporaries—Marin Marais, François Couperin, and Michel Delalande—as well as a new piece by Stephen Anthony Weinfield, Elizabeth Weinfield’s father and first music teacher.
The program is more than a musical resurrection paying homage to French baroque music. It is a collection of conversations spanning 300 years: between a daughter and her father, a forgotten composer and her successors, and an archive and live performance.
