ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on a different aspect of Lully's patterning: his manner of giving large-scale shape to dialogue scenes by introducing points of articulation of varying strength musical punctuation marks and paragraph indicators that complement the poetry and highlights the progression of the drama. It describes Lully's articulation of the music complements the irregular patterning introduced by Quinault. The flexibility of Lully's scene structure surely starts with Quinault's poetry. The chapter analyses an improved model for understanding the structure of dialogue scenes devoted entirely to music for vocal soloists. The airs in Lully's dialogues, involves almost no Italianate suspension of time; thus, an emotionally charged conversation often takes place in a series of airs. Adjacent airs are typically all in the same key; whether they are otherwise musically parallel or contrast with each other in form, meter, and texture is determined by the needs of the drama.
