François Couperin: Les Barricades Mystérieuses | Harp | 1 Hour | 432 Hz

More music in natural 432 hz tune:

https://pbgorny.bandcamp.com/

François Couperin's Mysterious Barricades transcribed for harp and converted to 432 Hz scale in one hour loop. Enjoy!

Paintings: A Vase of Flowers by Jan van Huysum (left and right) and Margaretha Haverman (middle).

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Les Barricades Mystérieuses (The Mysterious Barricades) is a piece of music that François Couperin composed for harpsichord in 1717. It is the fifth piece in his "Ordre 6ème de clavecin" in B-flat major, from his second book of collected harpsichord pieces (Pièces de Clavecin). It is emblematic of the style brisé characteristic of French Baroque keyboard music.

The work is in rondeau form, employing a variant of the traditional romanesca in the bass in quadruple time rather than the usual triple time.

"The four parts create an ever-changing tapestry of melody and harmony, interacting and overlapping with different rhythmic schemes and melodies. The effect is shimmering, kaleidoscopic and seductive, a sonic trompe l'oeil that seem to have presaged images of fractal mathematics, centuries before they existed."

The piece was voted at #76 in the Australian 2012 Classic 100 music of France countdown.

Les Barricades Mystérieuses was originally published with the spelling Les Baricades Mistérieuses ("single r" in the first word, and "i" rather than "y" in the second word). All four possible spelling combinations have since been used with "double r" and a "y" being the most common. There has been much speculation on the meaning of the phrase "mysterious barricades" with no direct evidence available to back up any theory. Nevertheless, of those that link the title to features of the music itself, Evnine believes harpsichordist Luke Arnason's is the most plausible:

"The title Les Barricades Mystérieuses is probably meant to be evocative rather than a reference to a specific object, musical or otherwise. Scott Ross, in a master class filmed and distributed by Harmonia Mundi, likens the piece to a train. This clearly cannot have been the precise image Couperin was trying to convey, but it is easy to hear in Les Barricades the image of a heavy but fast-moving object that picks up momentum. In that sense, the mysterious barricades are perhaps those which cause the "train" to slow down and sometimes stop... This hypothesis seems to fit in with the pedagogical aims of Couperin's music, since the composer presents himself as something of a specialist in building sound through legato, style luthé playing...Moreover, it seems to form a set with the following piece, Les Bergeries. This latter piece, though more melodic than Les Barricades, set in a higher register and more bucolic in feeling, is also an exercise in using a repetitive motif (in this case a left hand ostinato evocative of the musette) to build sound without seeming mechanical or repetitive. Both Les Barricades Mystérieuses and Les Bergeries, then, are exercises in building (and relaxing) sound and momentum elegantly."

While the title reflects the musical structure, there may be more at play. The suggestion of barricades is "a double entendre referring simultaneously to feminine virginity and the suspensions [of] harmonic [progressions] of the music, [whose] lute figurations [from the style brisé] are imitated to produce an enigmatic stalemate", as Judith Robison Kipnis explained the work's title and its interpretation by her husband Igor Kipnis.

Other suggested meanings for the title include:

impeding communication between people,

between past and present or present and future,

between life and death,

between the immanent and transcendent,

women's underwear,

allegedly a common way of referring to women's eyelashes among the Salonnière of the 17th century,

masks worn by performers of Le Mystère ou les Fêtes de l'Inconnu (The Mysterious One or the Celebrations of the Unknown One) staged by one of Couperin's patrons, the Duchesse du Maine in 1714,

a "technical joke...the continuous suspensions in the lute style being a barricade to the basic harmony".

The piece has been used as a source of inspiration by many others across different artistic fields including music, visual arts and literature. Some have simply used the title while others have created new works inspired by the original.

Style brisé (French: "broken style") is a general term for irregular arpeggiated texture in instrumental music of the Baroque period. It is commonly used in discussion of music for lute, keyboard instruments, or the viol.

The original French term, in use around 1700, is style luthé ("lute style"). It was used by François Couperin when referring to arpeggiated textures in his pieces such as La Mézangère, Les Charmes and Les Barricades Mystérieuses. Continuous pieces with an abundance of irregularly broken chords originated in French lute music of the 17th century.

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