Henry Purcell – Keyboard Suite in G Minor, Z661 (published 1696)

My knowledge of Baroque dance suites is limited to Bach and Handel, and my knowledge of Purcell is limited to Dido and Aeneas (1689), the famous “Trumpet Tune and Air” from The Indian Queen (1695), and a couple of trio sonatas I played in a chamber group in high school.  So I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone and check out a Purcell keyboard suite.  This one is from a group of suites published a year after Purcell’s death under the charming title of “A Choice Collection of Lessons” — apparently the first keyboard collection printed in England to be dedicated to a single composer.  The score I found online is actually a scan of a handwritten copy from 1705, which is a pain and a half to read thanks to obsolete conventions like six-line staffs (sometimes extended to as many as nine lines where modern notation would use ledger lines) and the use of sharps rather than naturals to indicate raising a note that’s flatted in the key signature.  The beats are also not even close to lined up, although I don’t know if that’s an obsolete convention or just plain sloppiness on the copyist’s part.  At least it’s educational, since I’ve forgotten most of what I learned in college about the history of notation.

As for the piece itself, it’s not too different stylistically from the Bach and Handel suites written a few decades later.  It’s not as texturally or rhythmically varied — no gigues, no fugal passages — but it follows the familiar Prelude-Almand-Corant-Saraband pattern, with all the dances in bipartite form, fairly contrapuntal, and generally abstracted enough that you wouldn’t want to try to actually dance to them.  By far the most striking aspect of the piece is Purcell’s free treatment of dissonance and cross-relations, especially in the Prelude and Almand.  He often has a te in the right hand at the same time as a ti in the left, even if the te doesn’t resolve down by step immediately.  At one point in the Prelude he has le in the right hand at the same time as a la in the left, and at another point the left hand plays a fast ti-la-te-sol-la, with the te serving no real harmonic function, presumably being there just for color.  These aren’t the kind of dissonances that Bach uses.  They don’t sound like the elegantly handled deviations of a master planner;  they’re more idiosyncratic and “half-baked” than that.  Actually, more than anything else they remind me of the keyboard sonatas of Sebastiàn de Albero — sort of a low-rent Scarlatti who’s actually pretty good in his own right — though that could be my ignorance of Baroque composers who weren’t born in 1685 speaking.