16thC Lute music on Guitar: a lost art?
David Norton
It seems that by-and-large, the whole practice of performing renaissance
lute (vihuela) music on the classical guitar has gone bye-bye. There are
still many performances/recordings of the "Bach Lute Suites" (too many,
IMO!), but performances/recordings of the pre-Bach lute repertoire don't
seem to happen any more.
When I posed this observation on a couple CG lists, the response was "it's
not done any more because the Early Musick people go ballistic at
inauthenticity". To me, this seems to be putting the Medium ahead of the
Message. The music by Milano, Capirola, Narvaez, Neusiedler, and the
earlier Elizabethan pieces works wonderfully on a classical guitar. I find
it incredulous that an entire century of excellent contrapuntal music,
written for plucked fretted string instruments, has been surrendered from
fear of The Wrath of The Critics.
Any inputs on this conundrum are eagerly sought!
David Norton
Robert Crim
wrote:
My own suspicion is that the same old pieces are being played over and
over. How many times can you hear the same Dowland Fantasia played
by different guitar players without asking your self if you really
want to hear yet another one another time? I doubt if the "early
music" people have the kind of clout it would take to keep all those
millions of guitar players from playing anything they damn well wish.
I submit that it is more a problem of availability of the lute music
to the guitar community. Tablature is a problem, intelligent
selection from the thousands of available lute pieces is yet another.
From what I've seen, the lack of good transcriptions of good 6 and 7ch
lute music keeps guitar players from reading through and picking out
the good ones. Of course, someone has to make those transcriptions,
and someone has to pay for them.
A lack of knowledgeable lute players to make those transcriptions and
a lack of knowledgeable guitar players to buy and use those
transcriptions are the only impediments to their being used.
YMMV
Robert
Christopher Schaub
lute, not guitar, but it is much easier to read tablature than standard
notation; a musical interpretation of tablature is another matter. After
about a week you'll get the hang of it. I encourage all guitar players to
tune down (the g to f#), capo up (the third fret) and start playing! The
problem is that guitar players play the pieces that have been anthologized
in standard notation -- this does get boring for sure. There is so much lute
music in tab compared to guitar music -- there aren't enough people playing
it! Even early music snobs play Vihuela music on the lute.
"Robert Crim" <frit...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:koul101p4p81tfaq0...@4ax.com...
David Norton
> over. How many times can you hear the same Dowland Fantasia played
> by different guitar players without asking your self if you really
> want to hear yet another one another time?
A valid argument (which the Bach L.S. players have yet to realize....) But
Dowland may not be the best eample, he uses the 7th & 8th course quite a
lot. Francesco da Milano: now THERE'S a different scenario. And of course
the vihuela literature is far more than Mudarra's Harp Fantasy, Milan's
Pavans, and Narvaez's Cows or Regretz.
> I doubt if the "early
> music" people have the kind of clout it would take to keep all those
> millions of guitar players from playing anything they damn well wish.
All it takes is one or two key critics, penning nasty reviews of major
recitalists' performances of lute music.
> From what I've seen, the lack of good transcriptions of good 6 and 7ch
> lute music keeps guitar players from reading through and picking out
> the good ones. Of course, someone has to make those transcriptions,
> and someone has to pay for them.
Mel Bey has published several decent books. Offhand, I can think of David
Grimes' edition of the complete Fantasias of Luys Milan, or Keith Calmes'
book of Mudarra's "suites" (which they'd have been called, if the word had
been invented in 1546!). From other publishing houses, John Duarte
transcribed much Milano, the Da Crema Fantasias, a set of Capirola, the
entire Varietie of Lute Lessons, the complete Edward Collard. Editions
Orphee' just released a complete edition of the Chilesotti Collection. So
it seems the music is out there, not all 20,000 pieces but a helluva lot,
and it seems none of them get played in major venues. It's almost like a
guilty sin, to be done behind closed doors after the children are asleep.
And that aside, learning French or Italian tablature only takes a few hours.
But CG players have plent opportunity to utilize the existing transcriptions
before branching out on their own
David
David Norton
"Christopher Schaub" <ch...@schaub.com> wrote in message
news:haESb.9431$%72....@twister.nyroc.rr.com...
> Lute tablature is very easy to learn, especially French tab. I play the
> lute, not guitar, but it is much easier to read tablature than standard
> notation; a musical interpretation of tablature is another matter.
I've long held the theory that one of the worst things to happen to
classical guitar was the adoption of single-stave conventional notation.
With TAB, you can have all sorts of complex contrapuntal lines happening
and it is not hard on the eyeballs. Look at a CG transcription of the
Huwett fantasia, and things get scary, fast. Andrew York (of the LAGQ)
tried in his early years as a composer to force the two-staff "keyboard"
notation, and his very first pieces were self-published in this manner.
That also works quite well for guitar, once you get used to reading bass
clef. He put the lowest strings on the bass clef, and higher strings in
treble, regardless of the pitch. But once Andrew got hooked up with a
mainstream publisher, the pieces were re-engraved into single staff.
David
Robert Crim
wrote:
>
>Mel Bey has published several decent books. Offhand, I can think of David
>Grimes' edition of the complete Fantasias of Luys Milan, or Keith Calmes'
>book of Mudarra's "suites" (which they'd have been called, if the word had
>been invented in 1546!). From other publishing houses, John Duarte
>transcribed much Milano, the Da Crema Fantasias, a set of Capirola, the
>entire Varietie of Lute Lessons, the complete Edward Collard. Editions
>Orphee' just released a complete edition of the Chilesotti Collection. So
>it seems the music is out there, not all 20,000 pieces but a helluva lot,
>and it seems none of them get played in major venues. It's almost like a
>guilty sin, to be done behind closed doors after the children are asleep.
>
Perhaps it's the desire to premier "new" music written specifically
for guitar? It may also be that the guitarists that played the big
gigs in the old days are leaving the scene and being replaced by
youngsters that don't wish to copying Bream or Segovia, etc. It is
kind of a puzzle, eh?
Robert
Howard Posner
> All it takes is one or two key critics, penning nasty reviews of major
> recitalists' performances of lute music.
Well, all it takes is a clueless performance to inspire a critic to write a
review that sounds "nasty" to partisan ears. But who are the one or two
"key critics" who can stifle an entire approach to performance? Are they
the same people as the "Early Musick people" who "go ballistic at
inauthenticity," mentioned in your first post as the reason why classical
guitar players don't play lute music?
Maybe the answer to your question is that if you don't hear many guitarists
playing lute music today (I'll assume this is the case) it's because, unlike
35 years ago, the players who are really interested in lute music become
lute players, and buyers of concert tickets and recordings who want to
listen to lute music will listen to lute players and not to guitarists who
are dabbling in the music and may not understand it well. Thus it's not
that early music people go ballistic, but rather that they're taking over
the market. Guitar players are getting out of the Francesco business for
the same reason that symphony orchestras are getting out of the Vivaldi
business: other musicians can do it, and sell it, better.
BTW, your comparison of Dowland and Francesco on the modern guitar is one
illustration of the problems in understanding. If you play Francesco right
off the page on a modern guitar (or, for that matter, a lute strung for
Dowland), there will likely be notes missing because he wrote for an
instrument with the bottom three courses tuned in octaves, and sometimes
used the upper octave as the melodic line.
Howard Posner
John Briggs
>
> And that aside, learning French or Italian tablature only takes a few
> hours.
>
There is a cartoon by David Hill in the February issue of Early Music
Review. It show a householder who has opened his door to find two figures
in duffle coats carrying lute cases. They greet him with, "Hello. We're
Jehovah's Lutenists. God has chosen us to talk to you about tablature."
:-)
--
John Briggs