Lieux Charmantes - Air de Mr. Desmarets

Recorded live in concert 1 December 2007. Air de Mr. Henri Desmarets from Airs et Brunettes... Ornez d'Agremens par Mr. Hotteterre le Romain, ca. 1723. Although it was published in the 1720s this little air comes from the seventeenth-century repertoire of airs (songs) that made up the original solo repertoire for flute. The first two flute players to hold positions at Court were Philibert Rebillé (fl 1667-1717) and Rene Descoteaux (1645-ca. 1732). Both were singers, and used the solo vocal repertoire as the basis of their flute playing. By the early eighteenth century many of these songs were standards for flute players, even though some of them had been composed fifty or more years earlier. Several collections for flute like Hotteterre's were published through the first half of the eighteenth century, drawing on this repertoire and usually having the text underlaid as a guide to shaping phrasing and articulation. The explicit rationale was that the French style was difficult to learn, even for native French speakers, and that knowing the song would inform the way the tune was played. (Try rephrasing a familiar tune like Happy Birthday: we know how it goes partly because we know the words.) In addition there was a style of ornamenting these pieces that combined sweeping Italian ornaments with the agrements or little ornaments that are central to the French style, and this, combined with a languishing, sighing tenderness, was the hallmark of French flute-playing at this time. The text of the air de cour was usually pastoral in theme, and there is much rhyming of houlette (shepherds crook) and herbette (a lawn or meadow). The brunette is a related type of pastoral verse, the subject of which is a maiden who, as luck would have it, is a brunette.

The flute used here, a three-piece instrument, is my copy of the sole surviving flute of Chevalier, a maker who flourished in the decades around 1700. With its small, almost round embouchure hole (the hole into which the player blows to sound the flute), small tone holes, and massive turnings on the joints and end-cap this is a typical early baroque French flute (see the graphic for the video) . As is typical of many French flutes of this period, the pitch is a=405.

The drawing is by Watteau.

Category:

Music

Tags:

• Hottetere
• flute
• traverso
• traversiere
• Desmarets
• air
• de
• cour
• brunette
• baroque