FIG. 19-6 Examples of gorgia (trillo and gruppo) from the preface to Caccini’s Le nuove musiche (1601).
And so it certainly would if it really were literal, but it is not. It just looks literal, and again we have
to be on our guard that music cannot be judged by its looks. There is still an oral practice to consider, one
to which Caccini devoted a lengthy illustrated discussion in the preface to Le Nuove musiche—a preface
that is for us a precious document, more famous by far than the actual songs it served to introduce. What it
introduces, as far as we are concerned, is note book of songs but the whole practice of musico-rhetorical
embellishment, a constant “oral” factor in almost every musical performance that took place during the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but one that left scant visible trace in the musical sources.
In this wonderful preface, Caccini, a virtuoso singer long before he became a “composer” (that is, a
writer-down of songs), generously divulges to his readers his whole bag of singerly tricks, called gorgia
(“throat-music,” already a clue to its production), learned in the first instance, he tells us, from his own
teacher Scipione del Palla, who guarded them closely as guild secrets. While sternly counseling against
their overuse by enthusiastic bumblers, Caccini provides the first systematic survey of the methods by
which solo performers (the only kind in monody) were expected to enlarge and dilate rhetorically on
written texts. It is a revealing lesson in charisma and a chastening reminder of how much is lost from any
performing repertoire that survives only in textual form.
Caccini’s rhetorical embellishments included some that multiplied (or, as the analogy then went,
divided) the written notes in pasaggii,—fast runs and the like. Others were calculated to imitate (or
rather, to stylize) various tones of voice or “manners of speaking” that give evidence of strong emotion,
and that therefore should be used only when singing “passionate songs,” never in “canzonets for dancing.”