Giovanni Bassano’s Divisions. A Computational Approach to Analyzing the Gap between Theory and Practice

“Division Ornamentation Practice” refers to the 16th-century phenomenon of embellishing a known melody in an extemporaneous or more pre-planned manner. 11 division instruction manuals were published by different performers during the 16th century and the first two decades of the 17th century. It is a common belief today that if performers wish to learn how to improvise divisions in a specific performer’s style, they need to practice the performer’s manual. In this paper, I challenge this assumption, demonstrating that, at least with the cornetist and composer Giovanni Bassano, there is an unsurmountable gap between his manual ornamentations, called here figurations, and the figurations he used in his division pieces. Surprisingly, in fact, Bassano uses less than 3% of his manual figurations in his division pieces. This raises the intriguing question of whether it is effective to practice Bassano’s manual figurations in learning to improvise in his style. I proposed three computational models to examine this question. None of them yield an overlapping ratio that suggests close affinity between the manual figurations and the division figurations that Bassano used in his division pieces. Moreover, I show that Bassano’s manual figurations are longer, faster and have a higher pitch range than the division figuration. Based on these findings, I recommend performers who wish to improvise in Bassano style to practice his figuration divisions rather than his manual figurations.