(b Haarlem, 1597 or 1598; d Haarlem, 27 July 1644). Dutch theorist and composer. He came from a patrician family, entered the priesthood in Haarlem and became a canon in 1628. As a musician he was entirely self-educated. He studied theoretical works from Pythagoras to Zarlino and, dissatisfied, turned to his prominent contemporaries – among them Constantijn Huygens, Mersenne, G.B. Doni and Descartes – for assistance. Although much is made of a song-writing competition between Ban and Antoine Boësset staged by Mersenne in 1640, in which it was a foregone conclusion that Boësset should win, Ban was unaffected by his loss (see Walker). In many of his letters he declared that music must be practised under strict and demonstrable rules and not left to individual arbitrary taste: it must not mask the natural delivery of a text but rather reinforce it. In this light his praise of, and familiarity with, contemporary Italian music is not remarkable; but it is typical of his ‘monodic approach’ that, although aware of the usefulness of modulation, he recognized neither the musical value nor the expressive power of dissonance.
Ban spent 20 years developing his system of musica flexanima (‘zielroerende zang’: ‘soul-moving singing’), wherein the text was expressed musically by means of specific intervals, harmonics and rhythms. The practical application of these theories is found in the ten three-part songs of his Zangh-bloemzel (Amsterdam, 1642). He did not complete his theoretical treatise Zangh-bericht, though he appended a short summary of it to the Zangh-bloemzel and issued a more developed version (Kort sangh-bericht) a year later. Ban was also interested in the problem of tuning: he even went so far as to publish a diagram of Mersenne’s 18-note clavier, calling it his ‘perfect clavier’ (‘volmaekte klaeuwier’; see illustration). However, neither this keyboard, with its adaption of Mersenne’s symbols for the various extra sharps and flats, nor his attempt at a wholly Dutch musical terminology, was accepted by his contemporaries.
Joannis Alberti Banni dissertatio epistolica de musicae natura, origine, progressu (Leiden, 1637)
Cort beduydsel vant zingen (MS, 1642, NL-Lu); ed. in Land
Kort sangh-bericht van Ioan Albert Ban … op zyne ziel-roerende zangen (Amsterdam, 1643); ed. F. Noske (Amsterdam, 1969)
Zangh-bericht, unfinished, lost
Letters and theoretical fragments, F-Pn, NL-Lu, many ed. within the correspondences of G.B. Doni, P.C. Hooft, Huygens and Mersenne
MersenneHU
J.P.N. Land: ‘Joan Albert Ban en de theorie der toonkunst’, TVNM, i/2 (1883), 95–111; iii/4 (1891), 204–10
D.P. Walker: ‘Joan Albert Ban and Mersenne's Musical Competition of 1640’, ML, lvii (1976), 233–55; repr. in Studies in Musical Science in the Late Renaissance (London, 1978), 81–110
R.A. Rasch: ‘Ban's Intonation’, TVNM, xxxiii (1983), 75–99
J.W.N. Valkestijn: ‘Een onbekend handschrift van Joan Albert Ban’, Liber amicorum Chris Maas, ed. R. Wegman and E. Vetter (Amsterdam, 1987), 131–54
RANDALL H. TOLLEFSEN