The Ranums' Panat Times

This Musing refers to Thierry Favier's "L'Atelier intérieur
de Marc-Antoine Charpentier," pp. 83-100,
in Les Manuscrits autographes de Marc-Antoine Charpentier,
edited by Catherine Cessac and published
by the Centre de Musique Baroque de Versailles
(Wavre: Mardaga, 2007).

published Sept. 25, 2007

This summer I spent weeks poring over the chart that accompanies Thierry Favier's article about the evolution of Charpentier's handwriting over the decades. Initially I was ecstatic about the detailed evidence he presented, and I set about incorporating it into my file about the the watermarks Charpentier used, Before long, troubling décalages, "time-slippages" became evident.

Accepting Favier's Continuum, as it now stands, means accepting the implications of that Continuum. And in order to accept that Continuum, one must accept that Charpentier routinely made cahiers from the paper he was using in a given month of a specific year, but that he then set them aside; that it often took him a year or more to get around to copying the works for that month and year into that waiting cahier; that he nonetheless always remembered exactly which blank cahier was supposed to be filled with the music in his rough draft of the compositions for that month; and that, more miraculous still, when he first made that blank cahier, he guessed exactly how many pages he would need for the piece he would eventually find time to copy into the cahier.

This all seemed so implausible that I made a variant of Favier's Continuum chart for myself, but in a simplified form. That is, I showed only the papers that date from the time when each cahier was made, and I excluded all the later replacement sheets that make it hard to determine just which hands (and papers) are original. Just as I suspected, there were indeed "time-slippages." I color-coded them, so that they would stand out more clearly. In hopes that this chart will help other scholars, I am inserting it into this Musing.

Here is what the chart shows:

•    The cahiers are not shown in numerical order, but in the order Thierry Favier placed them in his Continuum.
•    The time-slippages tilt downwards from left to right, which suggests that Favier's Roman series of notebooks is askew chronologically, compared with the French series.
•    Unless my charting of watermarks and Laurent Guillo's charting of PAP's are significantly off-target, one would expect the colors I added to Thierry Favier's Continuum to line up across from one another in the French and the Roman cahiers (much as they do in Guillo's chart on p. 43, and in my Vers une Chronologie, pp. 30-34.  Any time-slippages will therefore stand out in color. And they do just that in the chart below.
•    Rather massive time-slippages are highlighted in green, or, in the case of music composed in 1683 for the death of the Queen, in orange. Cahiers known to have subsequently been recopied are shown in blue, and the date of composition is also shown in blue. Cahier 31 (where Charpentier changed his treble clef in mid-cahier) is shown in purple, as are the cahiers that immediately precede and follow it. The four cahiers filled with music for the Dauphin (which are made of paper printed with unusually large staves) are highlighted in red.
•     "Tran-" plus a letter ("Tran-A," "Tran-B," and so forth, where "Tran-" is an abbreviation for "Transitional") is my way of indicating the unnumbered transitional hands that Favier lays out in his Continuum chart. Note that he finds almost all of these "Tran-hands" in the Roman series, and almost none in the French series (when they do appear in the French series, they tend to be on just a few isolated pages rather than an entire cahier). As a result, he presents only 15 hands in the French series but 21 hands in the Roman series ― only 13 of which appear in the French series.
•     To show the principal paper(s) in a specific cahier, I used the system that I devised to correlate my watermark labels and Laurent Guillo's PAP's
•     Owing to numerous gaps in the Mélanges for the period 1688-1704, this chart pays minimal attention to what Favier suggests about how the hands and the papers match, from one series to the other, during those years.

In a series of related Musings, I plan to comment upon some of these slippages during the pre-Jesuit decades. This particular Musing that you are reading is intended to show how overarching the problem is in Favier's Continuum chart. Scholars should therefore be wary about using Thierry Favier's chart as a tool for dating a given work or cahier.

For the moment, the important point is that Thierry Favier's Continuum diverges considerably from the combined chronologies of Hitchcock, Cessac and Ranum ("HCR" in the chart below, a convenient abbreviation just coined by Laurent Guillo).

I very much hope that Favier's Continuum can be salvaged or patched up. I am therefore going to attempt to determine the cause or causes of these slippages, and to propose how the many useful insights in the Continuum can contribute to our understanding of the Mélanges.

September 28, 2007: Shortly after publishing this Musing, a serious flaw in Thierry Favier's reasoning suddenly came to me. Please read the related musing on Size as an element in Thierry Favier's Continuum of Charpentier's handwriting, where I discuss this flaw.

I am sorry to see that the chart published so strangely; but fortunately, the slippages are visible...