(Fr.: ‘broken style’).
A term used to denote the use of a broken, arpeggiated texture in music for plucked stringed instruments, particularly the lute, keyboard, or viol. Although the term is most commonly applied to 17th-century French music, its usage in French is of modern origin and cannot be traced further back than La Laurencie (1928), who wrote of ‘ce qu’on a appelé le “style brisé” des Gaultier’. It may well have been borrowed from German, since the cognate German term has been used in exactly this sense at least since the early 18th century. The title-page of Daniel Vetter’s Musicalische Kirch- und Hauss-Ergötzlichkeit (Leipzig, 1709) describes its contents as chorales, with first a plain harmonization for organ, ‘nachgehends eine gebrochene Variation auff dem Spinett oder Clavicordio’. The contemporary French term is ‘luthé’, used by François Couperin (see, for example, Les charmes from his ninth ordre) and others. Based on historical usage, this term has much to recommend it since it refers in a special sense to the transference of idiomatic lute figurations to the harpsichord. This is a marked feature of French music of the mid-17th century, being found, for example, in the harpsichord music of Louis Couperin and J.H. D’Anglebert. The unmeasured preludes of French harpsichordists of this period provide telling examples of the wholesale adoption of such lute techniques to the keyboard.
The style originated as one of a number of division techniques in lute music of the late 16th century, and is used as such by Anthoine Francisque in his Le tresor d’Orphée (Paris, 1600). Its primary leading characteristic is the irregular and unpredictable breaking up of chordal progressions, and it is therefore to be distinguished from the regular patterning of broken chords in, for example, the arpeggiated toccatas of Kapsperger (Rome, 1604). The ‘style brisé’ was first used as a thoroughgoing principle by Robert Ballard (ii) in the varied repeats (doubles) of courantes in his lute books of 1611 and 1614, and it subsequently became the distinctive French lute texture. Its aim is twofold: to give subtlety of expression to what would otherwise be an ordinary harmonic progression, and to provide a continuum of sound which the player can mould for expressive ends. In the case of the harpsichord, the placing of notes in relation to one another temporally is one of very few expressive resources available. This is emphasized by one of the most expressive ornaments of the French harpsichord school – the suspension (a term coined by François Couperin in his Pieces de clavecin … premier livre, 1713) where the melody note is momentarily delayed.
During the 17th century the expressive moulding of a continuum of sound became a fundamental part of the keyboard idiom, equal in importance to the shaping of individual contrapuntal lines. These competing compositional priorities were ultimately, but straightforwardly, reconciled in the opening prelude of J.S. Bach’s Das wohltemperirte Clavier bwv846, or with more subtlety in the Allemande of the C minor French Suite bwv813. The ‘style brisé’ remained a standard expressive resource into the era of the pianoforte, with such notable examples as the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata op.27 no.2 (‘Moonlight’), and the Études op.10 no.1 and op.25 no.1 of Chopin.
L. de La Laurencie: Les luthistes (Paris, 1928)
D.J. Buch: ‘Style brisé, style luthé, and the choses luthées’, MQ, lxxi (1985), 52–67
D. Ledbetter: Harpsichord and Lute Music in 17th-Century France (London, 1987)
D. Ledbetter: ‘What the Lute Sources tell us about the Performance of French Harpsichord Music’, The Harpsichord and its Repertoire: Utrecht 1990, 59–85
M. Martin: ‘Préciosité, Dissimulation and le bon goût: Societal Conventions and Musical Aesthetics in 17th-Century French Harpsichord Music’, The Consort, li (1995), 4–12
DAVID LEDBETTER