Nabokov, Nicolas [Nikolay]

Nonot [Nonat, Nonotte, Notot], Joseph Waast Aubert

(b Arras, 12 Feb 1751; d Paris, 24 Aug 1840). French organist and composer. He exhibited great musical talent at an early age. His father, an engraver for Etats d’Artois, was against a musical career for his son, but while visiting Paris Joseph had the opportunity to play for the celebrated organist Leclerc, who was so impressed that he persuaded the father to allow Nonot to remain and study in Paris. Nonot later returned to Arras, where he was organist at St Géry from 1768 to 1783. During the Revolution he may have emigrated to England but later he was in France. Nonot is said to have excelled at accompanying from a full score and at improvising at the keyboard. It is likely that some of his later years were spent in Arras; one of his masses was performed in 1837 by the Philharmonic Society there.

WORKS

all published in Paris

Leçons méthodiques de clavecin et de forte-piano, i (1796)

Air de Marlborough varié, pf (c1797)

Musique religieuse à grand orchestre avec soli et choeur (1824–30): Kyrie, 1811; Credo; Hymne à la Vierge, 1783; O salutaris, 1778; Domine salvum fac, 1811; Gloria, inc., 1774

2 sonates, hpd, vn (n.d.)

Masses, 4 syms., 3 pf concs., pf sonatas, smaller works, all lost

BIBLIOGRAPHY

EitnerQ

FétisB

GerberNL

Choron-FayolleD

A. de Cardevacque: La musique à Arras depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu’à nos jours (Arras, 1885)

ETHYL L. WILL

Non-quartal harmony.

A term used to describe the harmonic syntax of some 15th-century music in which the vertical interval of a 4th does not appear except as a discord. Non-quartal style is common in three-part music of the generation from about 1450 to 1500, and may be seen as providing a strong contrast with the fauxbourdon style which is made up largely of parallel 6-3 chords (see Faburden and Fauxbourdon).

While the elimination of vertical 4ths may be seen as a novel and revolutionary phenomenon in the second half of the 15th century, it is really a result of the contrapuntal ideals of the 14th- and 15th-century composer combined with the spread of the total ambitus. Fundamental to the music of this period is the counterpoint between the tenor and the discantus: these parts must always form a satisfactory whole, obeying the laws of discant as explained by the theorists. In any 15th-century music the contratenor can be taken away and the remainder is contrapuntally self-sufficient. So the tenor and the discantus could rest on the octave or 5th and move in parallel 6ths or 3rds. A vertical 4th, however, was a discord and could appear only between the contratenor and one of the other parts; if the contratenor lay above the tenor note it would inevitably often form a 4th with the discantus. But after 1450 composers began increasingly to keep the contratenor in a range below that of the tenor while nevertheless retaining the basic discant relationship between tenor and discantus (see ex.1). In such circumstances the contratenor could not form a 4th with either part without producing a second-inversion triadic form – something that was unacceptable in 15th-century music. Essential vertical 4ths are therefore entirely absent. Such music consequently contains no first-inversion triads except in open position (e.g. at the cadence marked in bar 2 of ex.1).

In the 16th century three-part music became rarer and the importance of the contrapuntal self-sufficiency of the discantus–tenor duet was soon forgotten. But when Reese remarked that without the altus Isaac’s Isbruck, ich muss dich lassen ‘would be entirely non-quartal’ he meant simply that the discantus and the tenor retained their 15th-century relation.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ReeseMR

C.W. Fox: ‘Non-Quartal Harmony in the Renaissance’, MQ, xxxi (1945), 33–53

DAVID FALLOWS

Noone, Jimmie [Jimmy]

(b Cut Off, nr New Orleans, 23 April 1895; d Los Angeles, 19 April 1944). American jazz clarinettist and bandleader. After playing the guitar as a youth, he took up the clarinet at the age of 15. In 1913–14 he substituted for and then replaced Sidney Bechet in Freddie Keppard’s band; later, with Buddy Petit, he led the Young Olympia Band (1916). Noone left New Orleans for Chicago in 1917 and toured the Midwest with Keppard’s Creole Band until it broke up in spring 1918. After returning briefly to New Orleans, he left the city permanently in autumn 1918, travelling with King Oliver to Chicago, where they joined the band led by Bill Johnson at the Royal Gardens. Noone left the Royal Gardens in 1920 to join Doc Cook’s Dreamland Orchestra, with which he played until 1926. During this period he recorded 20 sides for Gennett, Okeh and Columbia.

Noone’s most important and influential period began in autumn 1926 when he took up residence at the Apex Club in Chicago. Here he led his own five-piece group, Jimmie Noone’s Apex Club Orchestra, which eventually included Earl Hines on piano. With this group he made a classic series of recordings in 1928. During the 1930s, except for engagements in New York in 1931 and 1935, Noone remained in Chicago leading small groups at various clubs. In the early 1940s he was taken up by the New Orleans revival movement and joined Kid Ory, Zutty Singleton, Jack Teagarden and others in club jobs and recording sessions in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Shortly before his death, he joined an all-star revival band organized for Orson Welles’s CBS variety show.

Noone, along with Bechet and Johnny Dodds, was one of the most significant New Orleans reed players, and a vital link between the older New Orleans style of clarinet playing and the Chicago swing manner. His musical style was influenced by his fellow African American teachers and colleagues in New Orleans, especially Bechet. Later, in Chicago, his formal study with Franz Schoepp, a classically trained clarinettist, helped give him a secure command of all three clarinet registers. His expressive performance of blue notes and solo breaks is nowhere better illustrated than in his four recordings on the Columbia label with Oliver’s band from October 1923. His later Apex Club recordings of I Know that you Know, Four or Five Times and Apex Blues (all 1928, Voc.) set a new standard for post-New Orleans ensemble playing. These recordings use the New Orleans ensemble style with a revised orchestration: alto saxophone as lead instrument, clarinet providing embellishments and a three-piece rhythm section, with Hines often supplying a third independent line with his ‘trumpet-style’ right hand. In this role Noone sometimes improvised complicated contrapuntal melodies; especially impressive are the sumptuous-sounding, fast and clean arabesques that he wove in the clarinet’s mid- to lower register.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A.J. McCarthy: ‘Jimmie Noone’, JazzM, x/4 (1964–5), 10–13

G. Schuller: Early Jazz: its Roots and Musical Development (New York, 1968)

W.H. Kenney: ‘Jimmie Noone: Chicago’s Classic Jazz Clarinetist’, American Music, iv (1986), 145–58

RICHARD WANG