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From: bo...@purr.demon.co.uk (bogus address)
Newsgroups: uk.music.notation,rec.music.early
Subject: Re: 17th century lute tablatures
Date: 15 Aug 2003 23:29:48 GMT
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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?]

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