17th century lute tablatures
bogus address
I have a Scottish tune in mid-17th-century lute (?) tablature that still
baffles me after a year of occasionally staring at the damn thing. It
doesn't seem to be using quite the same conventions as the Skene MS and
is generally sloppier (four bars of explicit metre and then you're on
your own). I'm not sure I'm even reading the pitches right.
Anybody know of a good up-to-date survey article on lute tablatures
used in 17th century Britain?
========> Email to "j-c" at this site; email to "bogus" will bounce <========
Jack Campin: 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU; 0131 6604760
<http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/purrhome.html> food intolerance data & recipes,
Mac logic fonts, Scots traditional music files and CD-ROMs of Scottish music.
Mike Dodds
news:<11...@purr.demon.co.uk>...
>
> I have a Scottish tune in mid-17th-century lute (?) tablature that
> still baffles me after a year of occasionally staring at the damn
> thing. It doesn't seem to be using quite the same conventions as the
> Skene MS and is generally sloppier (four bars of explicit metre and
> then you're on your own). I'm not sure I'm even reading the pitches
> right.
>
Jack,
I've studied lute tablature with Rob Mackillop and may be able to help. Can
you scan part of the piece and e-mail it.
Depending on the date it might be in one of the fancier tunings FDAfda for
the top 6 courses or F#Daf#DA. A clue to the number of courses will come
from the 'ledger lines' in the bass. E.g. /a = 7 course //a 8 etc. The extra
courses usually went stepwise down the scale, so for D major tuning G F# E D
C# B for a 12 course lute or G F E D C B for 11 for D minor tuning. Clues to
the tuning are often earlier in the manuscript with a Port, which is
probably a tuning prelude that often has parallel octaves.
You could also e-mail R...@robmackillop.com
Cheers
Mike Dodds
Mike Dodds
D
> C# B for a 12 course lute or G F E D C B for 11 for D minor tuning. Clues
to
That should be G F E D C# B for D Minor tuning... D'oh
Roman Turovsky
for major. There is small explication of lute tabulature at
http://polyhymnion.org/swv/theaxe.html
RT
Roman Turovsky
> baffles me after a year of occasionally staring at the damn thing. It
> doesn't seem to be using quite the same conventions as the Skene MS and
> is generally sloppier (four bars of explicit metre and then you're on
> your own). I'm not sure I'm even reading the pitches right.
>
> Anybody know of a good up-to-date survey article on lute tablatures
> used in 17th century Britain?
RT
William Howard
Mike Dodds <mdo...@thinkaboutit.peopledoc.com> wrote in message
news:bhcp7n$5ut$1$8300...@news.demon.co.uk...
> "bogus address" <bo...@purr.demon.co.uk> wrote in message
> news:<11...@purr.demon.co.uk>...
>
> >
>
> > I have a Scottish tune in mid-17th-century lute (?) tablature that
>
> > still baffles me after a year of occasionally staring at the damn
>
> > thing. It doesn't seem to be using quite the same conventions as the
>
> > Skene MS and is generally sloppier (four bars of explicit metre and
>
> > then you're on your own). I'm not sure I'm even reading the pitches
>
> > right.
>
> >
>
> Jack,
>
> I've studied lute tablature with Rob Mackillop and may be able to help.
Can
> you scan part of the piece and e-mail it.
>
> Depending on the date it might be in one of the fancier tunings FDAfda for
> the top 6 courses or F#Daf#DA. A clue to the number of courses will come
The extra
> courses usually went stepwise down the scale, so for D major tuning G F# E
D
> C# B for a 12 course lute or G F E D C B for 11 for D minor tuning. Clues
to
> the tuning are often earlier in the manuscript with a Port, which is
> probably a tuning prelude that often has parallel octaves.
>
> You could also e-mail R...@robmackillop.com
>
> Cheers
>
> Mike Dodds
>
>
If a short scanned piece of this work is available could someone email it to
me? It sounds very interesting.
Regards
William Howard
bogus address
Roman Turovsky wrote:
>> Anybody know of a good up-to-date survey article on lute tablatures
>> used in 17th century Britain?
> Matthew Spring published a heavy tome on the subject a couple years ago.
I've had a look at it on your suggestion. Impressive piece of work but
far more difficult to use than it needed to be; e.g. simply looking up
the basics of tablature in it involves educing the notation from his
examples, as he nowhere tells you what the odd letter forms mean (I have
not seen the square-root-sign-like glyph for "b" that he uses in any of
the Scottish sources I've been looking at). Nor does he tell you how to
interpret variant tablature notations (e.g. those that use both lines
and spaces). Nor does he tell you how to discover which tuning might
have been used in a specific source, if it's one he doesn't list. The
assumption seems to be that everybody will be using pre-edited sources
and he doesn't see it as his remit to tell you how to *be* a lute music
editor (or how to perform from a photostat of a period original).
Nor does he cover tablature for other instruments, and it looks like
the piece I'm curious about uses a tuning no lute ever did; it sounds
most plausible to me assuming four strings tuned in fifths, with the
fretting (or stopping) marked diatonically rather than by semitones -
i.e. on those assumptions it takes only a handful of adjustments of
note length to get a Scottish-sounding tune out of the tab, if not
a very good one - but what violin-family instrument of c.1680 used
tablature?
[You sent me an email, but Demon's mail server has been having problems
today and ate it - try again?]
Roman Turovsky
> not seen the square-root-sign-like glyph for "b" that he uses in any of
> the Scottish sources I've been looking at).
RT
John Briggs
>
> Nor does he cover tablature for other instruments, and it looks like
> the piece I'm curious about uses a tuning no lute ever did; it sounds
> most plausible to me assuming four strings tuned in fifths, with the
> fretting (or stopping) marked diatonically rather than by semitones -
> i.e. on those assumptions it takes only a handful of adjustments of
> note length to get a Scottish-sounding tune out of the tab, if not
> a very good one - but what violin-family instrument of c.1680 used
> tablature?
>
violin tablature were quite common in the seventeenth century, as violin
bands for dances, etc didn't use notated music.
--
John Briggs
William Howard
calculus while they wrote the score!!!
Did they use a different set of marks to the present ones for the durations
of the notes back then?
Regards
William
William Howard <willhow...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:bhfuhh$27n$2...@newsg1.svr.pol.co.uk...
Hugh Watkins
"William Howard" <willhow...@hotmail.com> wrote in message news:bhl1oh$ule$2...@news8.svr.pol.co.uk...
> Thanks Jack. Wow funny notes, looks like someone was trying to do some
> calculus while they wrote the score!!!
> Did they use a different set of marks to the present ones for the durations
> of the notes back then?
a tablature is not a score but a list of fingerings
the breve is ancient, today long but used to be short
Tablatura Nova and Samuel Scheidt
took the notation of songs and applied it to instruments
Samuel Scheidt of Halle, whose Tablatura Nova, published
in 1624, did much to crystallize the German Protestant organ and choral
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Neil_Hawes/theory22.htm
>>
a.. Plainsong was at first very imprecise, without clefs or staves
a.. The modern system for notes was developed initially in the fourteenth century<<
Hugh W
bogus address
> Thanks Jack. Wow funny notes, looks like someone was trying to do some
> calculus while they wrote the score!!!
[I'd emailed him a scan of it]
> Did they use a different set of marks to the present ones for the
> durations of the notes back then?
Duration isn't marked at all.
To put the curious out of their misery while using less bandwidth
than emailing a scan, here's an ASCII copy of the original tab. It's
written on the top three lines of a five-line staff (other pieces in
the MS use four lines). The parens represent a bracket drawn over a
group of notes (which in this context seems to mean "here's a phrase
with some shorter notes in it" rather than anything precise).
Cowgate gigue
2
---ba---cb--e--|----c|-dcbb:||:----b--------
dcb--d---------|dcb--|c----:||:cde--bb(cbabc)
-------------dd|-----|-----:||:-------------
------b--bcab----b------------bcde--b-----|]]
a--cde-bb----cde--bb-c(abc)a------de--dcbb|]]
-cc-------------------------cc-------c----|]]
Assuming it's violin tablature, with diatonic rather than semitone
steps, and assuming an unwritten lowering of the G on the top string
to stay in the same key as the lower ones, I interpret the tune this
way (ABC notation, look for the ABC homepage for a spec or software
to handle it):
X:1
T:Cowgate gigue
M:6/8
L:1/8
Q:3/8=100
K:B Minor
dcB fed|g2f bGG|d2c B2g |cag f2f:|
cde fBB|cB/A/B/c/ AFF|cde fBB |fge f3 |
cde fBB|cA/B/c AFF|fga bd/e/f|Fdc B2B|]
The second half sounds better.
Are there printed 17th century examples of this sort of violin tablature?
Stephan Olbertz
http://www.robmackillop.com/
Regards,
Stephan
bo...@purr.demon.co.uk (bogus address) wrote in message news:<11...@purr.demon.co.uk>...
ajn
best persons to identify it. ajn