The Ideal Partner: improvising songs and their accompaniments
Performers including 18th century Swedish songwriter Carl Michael Bellman and 19th century German composer Carl Loewe were both noted for their abilities to spontaneously generate a song from a given poem.
Researcher: Tammas Slater
Echoing this, during the 18th and 19th centuries composed songs were frequently published with skeletal accompaniments. This could be for economic reasons – fitting them onto a single page, and to make them financially and technically accessible for the genre’s primary market of amateurs, making music in the home. It left room for chords to be filled out, or for accompanimental figuration to be varied, particularly in the course of a strophic song.
The practice of altering accompaniments persisted through the 19th century, particularly in the Victorian tradition of the strophic ballad, a mainstay of popular song recitals across the English-speaking world. This practice was attested to in a chapter of Algernon H Lindo’s The Art of Accompanying (1916).
My project aims to unearth these practices which, as a result of their ephemeral and culture-bound nature, have disappeared from the written record, and thereby to liberate the accompanist from the domination of the written page.
Image: Marche funèbre composée pour les funérailles d'un grand homme sourd by Alphonse Allais (1854–1905), Public Domain.