Summary
By the time he turned to solving matters of musical time and tempo, Jean-Baptiste Davaux (1742–1822) had become one of the most beloved French composers, despite regarding himself strictly a musical amateur. Though trained as a violinist and composer, Davaux worked professionally at a number of private and government posts for the better part of thirty years, including an appointment to the Ministry of War following the revolution, before being elected to the Légion d’Honneur and awarded a comfortable pension. How much more remarkable, then, was Davaux’s preeminence among living French symphonists, a reputation only bested by that of Francois-Joseph Gossec, arguably the country’s most active professional composer and conductor. Indeed, by the time Davaux unveiled his contribution to musical timekeeping, his scores were being published in Germany, England and the Netherlands and circulated as far away as America.
Davaux offered charming, tuneful and accessible music to those attending the popular Concert spirituel in the Tuileries and was even known to incorporate patriotic airs like La marseillaise into his scores, to the delight of Parisian audiences. In 1784 the composer unveiled another appealing score, his Symphony in E-flat major, the first of three concertante symphonies published as his Trois Symphonies à Grand Orchestre, op. 11. The E-flat symphony opens with a martial statement scored for the entire orchestra in unison before matters are handed to the first violins, whose lyrically attractive melody is vintage Davaux. In other words, there is little here to suggest the composer was making musical inroads, save for one subtle exception: in addition to the brisk Italian tempo indication of Allegro un poco Presto provided at the outset, Davaux included a series of letters and numbers on the first violin part (in Davaux’s day orchestras were often led by the concertmaster, the premier violon), numerical code relating to calibrations on his newly fabricated musical chronometer.
It was Davaux’s own frustration with the limitations of Italian tempo descriptions that had led him to the shop of one of the world’s most revered horologists, Abraham-Louis Breguet (1747–1823).
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- MeasureIn Pursuit of Musical Time, pp. 125 - 138Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2022