The Implementation of Lombardic Rhythm Inégalité

Although it is well-established that the implementation of rhythmic inegalité was the modus operandi in keyboard music of the French Classical period (1655-1770), that “long-short” inegalité existed on a continuum from doubly-dotted to triplet rhythm, and that Lombardic rhythm (“short-long”) inegalité was also utilized, modern performance practice has been seemingly hesitant to introduce Lombardic rhythm inegalité as normative. One can scarcely find any professional recordings of the French Classical organ repertoire that interpret any given concatenation of notes as Lombardic, while the application of “long-short” inegalité is seemingly ubiquitous. One potential cause behind this disparity lies in the fact that Lombardic rhythm inegalité was indeed used less frequently than the other kind. Furthermore, just as few examples exist within the French Classical repertoire of clearly indicated inegalité, so too are there even fewer illustrations of Lombardic rhythm. Nonetheless, this paucity of examples by no means indicates a complete absence of such. One composer, Nicolas Gigault (1627-1707), transcribed the majority of his corpus with clearly delineated inegalité of both varieties. Daniel Sherman Pyle has demonstrated the efficacy of Gigault’s organ works as a paragon for the emulation of inegalité. While other composers did not write with the same degree of exactitude as Gigault, a thorough examination of the instances that they nonetheless did transcribe Lombardic rhythms can provide a similar standard from which to draw a more informed performance practice. Furthermore, while any given ornament could have hypothetically been applied to a variety of places within any early keyboard repertoire, any explicit indication of ornamentation nonetheless underscores a certain extra degree of intentionality on behalf of the composer. Therefore, while any given Lombardic rhythm ornamentation may not by itself indicate the frequency with which such an ornament might have been implemented (and alternatively the absence of such express indications in other repertoire do not disallow or even adumbrate the potential absence of such ornamentation), nonetheless any given pattern of Lombardic rhythm ornamentation must at least indicate a plausible scenario from which other potential opportunities for this type of ornamentation could be inferred. To this end, a thorough examination of not only French Classical repertoire, but also Italian, English, and German repertoire for the occurrence of Lombardic rhythms can elucidate a variety of parameters for which the implementation of Lombardic rhythm inegalité is appropriate. Therefore, the aim of this project is to examine a wide variety of keyboard repertoire of the 17th-18th centuries and extrapolate from those examples this set of parameters.