'), contrasting this with the new ‘ténor élevé’ (range
e to b', with a
falsetto extension to d').(Fr.: ‘tenor’).
A middle part (usually a tenor) of a vocal or instrumental piece of music. The origins of the word in this sense are obscure. ‘Taille’ was used to mean a tenor voice by the mid-16th century, though in published partbooks of both vocal and instrumental music in France the nomenclature was almost invariably Latin. Philibert Jambe de Fer, in his Epitome musical (1556), named the four voices dessus, contrehaut, teneur and bas, but he switched from ‘teneur’ to ‘taille’ in describing instruments of the viol, violin and flute families. The first published partbooks to use French nomenclature were those of the Dodécacorde (1598) by Claude Le Jeune, the foremost composer of the Académie de Poésie et de Musique, whose goal was to elevate the status of the French language. Mersenne (Harmonie universelle, 1636–7) used French terminology in describing musical instruments, equating ‘taille’ with ‘ténor’ ‘because it holds the plainchant’.
‘Taille’
remained the standard term in France for a tenor instrument throughout the 17th
and 18th centuries. In Bach’s scores it refers to an oboe in F. Brossard (Dictionaire)
described the taille naturelle (with range normally e–f')
as ‘the voice in which almost all men can sing’; for the haute-taille he
extended the range to a'. In Baroque opera taille was most often
used to refer to chorus tenors, leading male roles being assigned to the haute-contre;
Rousseau remarked in his Dictionnaire (1768) that ‘almost no taille
roles are used in French operas’. Towards the end of the 18th century both
‘taille’ and ‘haute-contre’ were superseded by the word ‘ténor’, and one of the
last mentions of ‘taille’ as a contemporary term is in Gilbert Duprez’s L’art
du chant (1845). Duprez equated ‘taille’ with ‘ténor limité’ (range c
to g', with a falsetto extension to b'), contrasting this with the new ‘ténor élevé’ (range
e to b', with a
falsetto extension to d').
French organ composers of the Baroque era frequently used the term ‘en taille’ for pieces that featured a particular stop (e.g. Tierce, Trompette or Cromorne) for a solo melody in the middle of the texture. Among numerous examples is the ‘Tierce en taille’ from the Messe à l’usage ordinaire des paroisses by François Couperin (ii).
MGG1 (F. Reckow)
GroveO (L. Sawkins)
OWEN JANDER