Eats lutes and leaves

On camera

2010-12-05T16:22:00.002+01:00

Finally, some videos of me in concert!

I've played quite a few solo concerts this year of a programme of music from the Matthew Holmes lute book, to mark the publication by the Lute Society of a new facsimile edition of this important manuscript. These videos are of my concert in October at an English Country House, Hammerwood Park in Sussex. It's a live recording, of course, so no second chances or retakes!

It's a curious experience to watch yourself on video. It takes a little while to detach yourself from being the performer, reliving the experience from the inside, and to become an observer, watching and listening from the outside like anyone else. Then you can start to relax and enjoy it...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZU2E7MYITY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4F89QwiMgw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltYrmMO7meA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOzjX2Kv4Bo

No-one expects the Italian Inquisition

2010-11-01T20:18:00.006+01:00

The title page of Giulio Caccini's songbook 'Le Nuove Musiche, published in Venice (and available online from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France). It's a classic work, introducing the new style of solo song with figured bass continuo, and containing such favourites as 'Amarilli mia bella'. Caccini was one of the first players of the newly-invented chitarrone, and explains in his preface how the songs are to be accompanied by this instrument. The preface also sets out in some detail the ways in which the singer can ornament the vocal line, and the songs themselves show this in elaborate practice.

But before getting to this, there's a hurdle to be jumped...

"I, Brother Francesco Tibaldi Fiorentino of the Minori Conventuali have read these madrigals in music by Signor Giulio Caccini Romano, and being composed in the matter of worldly love, I have found nothing in them repugnant to the catholic faith, nor against the precepts of the holy church, republics or princes, and in faith of this I have written these four verses in my own hand in Santa Croce of Florence, on the last day of June 1602, with the dedicatory letter to Signor Lorenzo Salviati and another to the Readers.

The printing is allowed, with the permission of the Father Inquisitor, the 1st of July 1602. Cos. Vicar of Florence.

Granted licence to print them in Florence. In quorum fidem. Florence, the 1st of June 1602. The Inquisitor of Florence."

The title page shows a date of 1601. So it looks as though the censorship process delayed the publication by at least six months. Bureaucracies, always reliably slow.

Sweetness

2010-06-18T18:28:00.007+02:00

More from the Matthew Holmes Cambridge lute manuscripts. This page contains a galliard by John Dowland, entitled Mignarde, which is an adjective meaning "d'une délicatesse, d'une douceur affectée", according to Larousse. Not entirely positive, then.

Mignarde is in the very unusual key, for the lute, of E minor. This might be a wordplay on the title, since Mi is the musical note E. Dowland used this device in other music, most notably the song Lasso vita mia, mi fa morire, where the highlighted syllables outline the initial melody, dropping from A down to D.

There are quite a few incorrect notes in this piece, some corrected and overwritten, some not. Generally, they're out by a semitone (i.e. by one fret). For example, in the B major chord in the final cadence, the added dominant 7th A, which should be fret e on the 4th course, has been written as fret f.

How did this happen? It looks as though Holmes can't have been copying directly from a tablature source (unless his source also had all the same mistakes). He's unlikely to have been making an intabulation from an original in conventional notation, since such originals don't really exist. Most likely he was working from memory, but away from his instrument. An unusual key means unfamiliar chord shapes and fingering patterns: easy to go wrong. If he'd had his lute to hand, he would have spotted and corrected those mistakes.

Sweet torment

2010-04-05T09:52:00.003+02:00

Si dolce e'l tormento has become one of Monteverdi's greatest hits, simple yet affecting, recorded by Philippe Jaroussky with L'Arpeggiata and by many others. But it's surprisingly difficult to find the music for it. Look in the 9th book of madrigals, as suggested by the BBC. It's not there. An online search turns up only a sadly unreliable modern transcription which confuses E flats and D sharps.

It turns out that the song comes not from one of Monteverdi's own books but from a 1624 collection by Carlo Milanuzzi, the Quarto Scherzo delle Ariose Vaghezze. And, deep inside a master's thesis by Cory Gavito of the University of North Texas, there's a facsimile of the original song.

Surprise: above the voice part, there are chords for guitar, just like a modern pop song. The chords are in the Alfabeto system, widespread at the time, in which each common chord is rather arbitrarily assigned a letter of the alphabet. The song opens with chords E, D, H, G which in today's terms are chords of D minor, A minor, B flat major, F major. I'd love to hear what Joni Mitchell would make of it.

A double-headed mace

2010-04-01T14:37:00.005+02:00

Thomas Mace, stout defender of women lutenists, earned his place in the pantheon of great eccentrics with his invention of the magnificent Lute Dyphone. The Dyphone cunningly combined two instruments in one, the Majestick Theorboe (on the right) and the High Improved French Lute, with no less than fifty strings between them. Mace says that he himself built the only Dyphone in existence in 1672. I'm not aware that anyone has tried to build one since, despite the numerous advantages detailed by the inventor.

Mace's reason for creating the Dyphone was an unexpected one: his deafness. He could no longer hear the soft sound of a normal lute, and was searching for something stronger. The Dyphone proved to be 'absolutely the Lustiest or Loudest Lute, that I ever yet heard'. Even so, he still needed to hold his teeth to the edge of the instrument to hear everything distinctly.

Mace was already in his 60's when he published Musick's Monument, in which the Dyphone appears, in 1676. The book was published thanks to the generosity of 300 subscribers, each of whom took a copy ('in sheets' - the binding was extra) for twelve shillings. Which was quite a lot of money: equivalent to £81 today using the retail price index, or a staggering £903 using average earnings. One of the subscribers was Isaac Newton, like Mace a member of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Egality, sorority

2010-03-25T15:14:00.002+01:00

There's a thriving internet mailing list dedicated to the lute. Based at Dartmouth, an Ivy League university in New Hampshire, it hosts lively discussions between lute enthusiasts around the world. It's friendly and egalitarian, and all are welcome.

But I noticed something strange a few months ago, and I posed the question: "Of the last 100 individuals to post to this list, 95 were men. Is this representative of the wider lute world? Any ideas why?". Lots of replies, lots of theories, including some anxious denials from men that any sort of discrimination existed. Most plausible, I think, is that the huge male bias in the guitar world (and why is that?) finds a reflection in the lute world. And, as one woman pointed out, larger hands help too.

It's not just that internet mailing lists have a male bias, although this may be true. A recent meeting of the Lute Society in London was at least 75% male, and some of the other 25% had been dragged along by their partners.

It wasn't always so. The excellent Thomas Mace, in Musick's Monument (1676) rebuts a number of 'False and Ignorant Out-cries against the Lute', including this one:

The Fifth Aspersion is, That it is a Woman's Instrument.

To which he stoutly answers:

If this were True, I cannot understand why It should suffer any Disparagement for that; but rather that It should have the more Reputation and Honour.

Good on you, Thomas.

Online Melchior

2010-03-22T11:45:00.003+01:00

Brilliant: a facsimile copy of Melchior Newsidler's Teutsch Lautenbuch (see my earlier post) has just been put online by the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. High-definition, un-retouched, with even the covers and the blank pages. Scrumptious. Unfortunately, this copy doesn't appear to contain the page with the portrait of Melchior. That, for the record, came from the facsimile published by Cornetto Verlag, Stuttgart, which is taken from a copy in the Heidelberg university library.

I've added it to my ever-increasing database of online lute and early music books at http://www.creator.zoho.com/peterskeeter/lute-and-early-music-books/#

Keys please

2010-03-15T16:02:00.004+01:00

Remember the Pavan by John Johnson which finds its way to G flat major at one point? I've just been playing an anonymous fantasia from the Hirsch lute book (c. 1595), folio 68v, in the equally way-out key of G sharp minor. It's immediately followed by another fantasia in the much more common key (for lutes) of G minor. Equal temperament. Please.

Lautenschlagen du edle Kunst

2010-03-15T15:01:00.001+01:00

I've just been listening to Paul O'Dette's lovely CD of solo lute music by Melchior Newsidler.

Newsidler's Teutsch Lautenbuch (Strassburg, 1574) is an ambitious book. It's written in German tablature, an unintuitive system of notation that makes even lutenists shudder. Most of the content is arrangements for solo lute of polyphonic vocal music: nine big motets by Josquin, Willaert, Verdelot and others, various chansons, madrigals, and German songs. There's also a set of German dances, and several passemezzos and fantasias.

In his foreword, Newsidler explains why he published two books in Italian tablature some years before [in 1566]. Firstly, because he hoped by this means to make the music most accessible to art-lovers in Germany and elsewhere; also, since he wanted to make his music available in countries to which German lute tablature hadn’t spread, and to counter the reputation that the Germans had only coarse, peasant, and drunken music (“ein grobe, Pewrische und Bachantische Musicam”). But then he learned that some people thought this displayed a contempt for his dear Fatherland; so he wanted to shake off this accusation, and to address the remaining portion of lute-lovers. Hence this Teutsch Lautenbuch.

Amazingly, Benedictus de Drusina in 1573 published a version of Newsidler's first two books transcribed into German tablature; maybe it’s this that prompted the Teutsch Lautenbuch the following year.

The Teutsch Lautenbuch contains some fairly early examples of music for seven-course lute. Newsidler explains the need for the seventh course, and why he prefers it to be tuned to F (on a G instrument), rather than the more logical D.

Although it doesn't sound so in O'Dette's hands, the music is pretty difficult. Newsidler's advice? If you find these pieces difficult, he says, study the simpler ones first – there are some – then the others will become easier.

There's a most impressive portait of Newsidler at the front of the book, together with a rather endearing motto:

Lautenschlagen du edle Kunst /
Erfröwest s Herz und machest gunst /

Lute playing, you noble art
You gladden the heart and create goodwill

p.s. Like Shakespeare, Newsidler's name appears in various spellings. He's Newsidler in the German book; Neysidler in the Italian ones (misspelt as Neysdler on the title page); and Neusidler on the CD. His more famous father, Hans, favoured the Newsidler spelling in his various books.

I am NOT going to make a joke about this

2010-01-09T21:23:00.003+01:00

What a fine instrument. This is the British Museum citole, made in around 1320, previously known as the Warwick gittern. It was the subject of a detailed presentation by conservator Chris Egerton at a recent meeting of the Lute Society, which has now been written up in Lute News, December 2009.

The article explains that citole and gittern were similar instruments, which existed contemporaneously in Northern Europe in the the medieval period. One mid 15th century gittern by Hans Oth survives, and the fragments of another have been recovered from the archaeological excavation of a latrine in Elblag, Poland, described in The Consort (2002).

Now, try as I might, I can't imagine any plausible reason that a gittern should be found in a latrine. Actually, I'm not even going to speculate here. No.

Temperament 2

2010-01-03T12:19:00.009+01:00

I showed some scepticism in an earlier post about mean-tone tuning on the lute.

This is reinforced by the wide range of keys in which lute music is written. Tuning systems other than equal temperament have a 'home' key in which they sound best. The further away you get from the home key, the less good they sound. So non-equal tempered systems work best in a narrow range of keys.

Assuming a lute tuned in G, a good starting point is the key of G major or minor. The instrument sounds good, the fingering works well, and as a result there are plenty of pieces in those keys. Yet the repertoire stretches a long way on either side. On the sharp side there's a lot of music in D major and minor, A minor (think Lachrimae), and even in E minor (Dowland's Mignarda). On the flat side we find pieces in C major and minor, F major and minor, B flat major and minor, E flat major, and A flat major (think Walsingham). In modern terms, that's a range of key signatures from two sharps to five flats. The music isn't kept strictly separated into different keys, either: for example, the Fantasie by Laurencini in Varietie of Lute Lessons (Robert Dowland, 1610) finishes in D major and is immediately followed by Ferrabosco's Fantasie in B flat minor.

Within pieces, the keys range still further. The first example below is from Sir John Langton's Pavan by John Dowland, which appears in Varietie. The piece has started in D major but at this point we're on a chord of F sharp major, the dominant of B minor. In the second example, from a Pavan in F minor by John Johnson in Dd 2.11 (f. 44v), we've hit G flat major at the beginning of the second bar. The same chord? Whichever way you approach it, it's going to be problematic in a non-equal tempered tuning system.

The argument is sometimes made that the different sound quality of different keys is one of the positive characteristics of non-equal tempered systems. Up to a point, I would say, but examples like this go well beyond that point for me. It's also an aesthetic that would apply only to instruments, since singers don't generally choose to sing out of tune in more remote keys. That makes it unconvincing for me.

Interestingly, John Dowland gives detailed instructions in Varietie on how to position the frets on a lute. He recounts the anecdote about how Pythagoras discovered musical proportions by hearing smiths in a forge beating iron with different sized hammers, and he tries to follow these simple Pythagorean ratios in his fretting system. The 12th fret is positioned at half the length of the string, the 7th at one-third the length, the 5th at one-quarter, and the 2nd at one-ninth the length. The positioning of the lower frets is more complex: the first fret at 2/33 of the string length, the third at 5/33, and the fourth at 53/264 which is almost, but not quite, a pure Pythagorean major third, which would be at 1/5 the length. The 8th, 9th and 10th frets are positioned at one third of the sounding length of the string stopped at the 1st, 2nd or 3rd fret: in other words, a pure Pythagorean fifth higher.

Phew. That would seem to be definitive, coming from the master himself. But the problem is that this tuning system is as skewed as any other. In particular, the semitones are of very different sizes, with the widest being 38% bigger than the narrowest, and as a result various octaves and other intervals are out of tune. So it really can't be said to give a more satisfactory result than any other system. Incidentally, there's no suggestion from Dowland that frets might be moved for different keys.

So what's the answer? Well, as I said before, every system is a flawed compromise. But for me this is one further factor in favour of equal temperament on the lute.

Pro am

2010-01-02T10:07:00.006+01:00

The English royal family employed lute players for over four hundred years. The first record dates from 1285, when 'Johann Le Leutour' appears in royal accounts, and the line continued into the seventeenth century. Distinguished names along the way included Philip van Wilder, John Johnson, Daniel Bacheler, Philip Rosseter, John Dowland, Robert Johnson and Jacques Gaultier.

Much of the surviving English lute music was composed by these top professionals. Yet they didn't generally transmit this music themselves. In fact, Matthew Spring in The Lute in Britain (p. 111) suggests that:

"Composers may have actively avoided transmission to prevent plagiarism and competition. Surviving sources are strongly biased towards the amateur, and were often compiled as the result of a course of lessons ... Professional lutenists may have played without music ... and are likely to have been prompted to write down their pieces when teaching them to others, rather than for themselves."

Jane Pickering, Herbert of Cherbury, Margaret Board, Dallis: all amateurs. The pupils, says Spring, "were often young, between 15 and 20, and were typically young ladies from the leisured classes ... or young men of a lower social standing who wished to improve their employment and social acceptability." Even the great set of manuscripts compiled by Matthew Holmes exist "as a result of amateur enthusiasm. A professional lutenist would not have bothered".

As for published books of lute music (of which there were very few in England), each is presented as a didactic work, containing instructions on how to play the lute as well as the actual music.

This does all make one wonder: is the surviving music simplified stuff, geared towards the amateur? What did the professionals play? Was there a whole different style of playing, now lost?

Maybe; but I'm inclined to think not. Contrapuntal works such as fantasias (which occupy pride of place in Robert Dowland's Varietie of Lute Lessons, 1610) are fully worked-out and ambitious pieces. Varietie contains some exceptionally challenging music, with highly elaborate diminutions. Aesthetically, not to mention technically, one wouldn't want to go much further.

Possibly these are written-out examples of what might normally have been improvised. It reminds me, from a different age, of the contemporary editions of Corelli

which present the music as the composer himself is supposed to have played it: masses of gorgeous detail built on a simple written foundation.

Lots of lutes

2009-12-28T21:23:00.005+01:00

My recent concert in Pau included a number of French Airs de Cour for voice and lute from the early seventeenth century. More than a thousand of these were published, in beautifully-produced editions.

The voice parts are written in conventional musical notation and the lute part in tablature. An unexpected problem arises. My lute is tuned in G. However, the songs we chose for the concert appeared to require lutes tuned at four different pitches (G, A, C and D) in order for voice and lute to come out in the same key.

What's the answer? Well, for most of the songs I ended up transposing, which is a shame since it completely changes the fingering of the lute parts, rendering the tablature useless.

So, should I have four lutes by my side, switching instruments for each song as required? It seems impractical, not to mention expensive. Is that really what the composers intended?

Jonathan Le Cocq also thought this was odd, and published a study about it in the Lute Society Journal, 1992. 68% of the air de cour repertoire appears to require a lute in A, 27% a lute in G, and the rest lutes at other pitches. However, the A-lute pieces are strongly associated with a certain set of keys: C major, D minor, and G minor. Played on a lute on G these would come out in B flat major, C minor and F minor. It's possible, then, that the songs should sound in those keys and that it's the voice part which has been transposed up by a tone, to avoid having to write too many flats. In other words, I can stick to playing everything on my G-lute and the singer can adjust. That's just fine.

As it happens, though, lutes did exist in many different sizes and pitches. As Matthew Spring explains in his book The Lute in Britain, many continental lute duets are for instruments at different pitches, often a tone or a fourth apart. Trios are found for lutes at the unison, fourth and fifth, and Adriaenssen's quartets require lutes in A, G, E and D. So maybe I need to buy more instruments. Lots more instruments...

Elementary (2)

2009-12-26T17:32:00.002+01:00

Now that looks a bit better, doesn't it? This is a sneak preview of the same page from Dd 2.11, but taken this time from the copy that the Lute Society will be using for its facsimile publication. Legible! In colour! Place your orders now.

Elementary

2009-12-24T11:16:00.005+01:00

Cambridge University Library MS Dd.2.11. The very title makes the heart beat a little faster and sets the mouth watering, doesn't it? Alright, I admit it's not the most thrilling of names. But it's possibly the most important source of English lute music. Copied by Mathew Holmes in c. 1588 - 1600, it contains 200 pages and 325 wide-ranging pieces of music.

The bulk of the music is by the great English lute composers of the time such as John Dowland, Anthony Holborne, Francis Cutting, Francis Pilkington and John Johnson. But there are also appearances by continentals such as Francesco da Milano (from 50 years earlier), Emanuel Adriaenssen, Alfonso Ferrabosco, or Matthäus Waissel. As well as the expected pavans, galliards, fantasias and the like, there are also lots of short page fillers, little pieces lasting maybe 30 seconds with colourful titles: Clement's squirrel, Hunting of the mouse, Go merrily wheel, Playfellow, and various Jigs and Toys.

I'm lucky to have a photocopy of the manuscript, but it's a poor quality copy and often illegible, as the picture shows. So I'm delighted that the Lute Society is publishing a smart new facsimile edition in 2010. I am putting together a concert programme of music from Dd.2.11 which I'll be performing in several concerts in May 2010. One of them is planned to be at the second European Lute Festival in Germany, where Ian Harwood will also be giving a talk about the manuscript. Ian is president of the Lute Society, and the scholar who did the pioneering research on the Holmes manuscripts, and it's a privilege to be working with him.

My picture isn't just a random page. The manuscript contains several vocal intabulations: arrangements for solo lute of polyphonic pieces originally for voices. This particular one seems to have been unidentified until now, so I was rather chuffed when playing through the manuscript to find that I recognised it. It's an arrangement of the 5-voice motet Verbum Iniquum by the Spanish composer Cristobal de Morales, which also exists in printed versions for lute from Germany (Newsidler, 1544), Spain (Fuenllana, 1554) and France (de Rippe, also 1554). It seems to have taken another 40 years to reach England.

From harmony, from heav'nly harmony, this universal frame began.

2009-11-21T19:58:00.006+01:00

Now pay attention. This diagram (click to enlarge) reveals the secret of life, the universe and everything. It appears in Marin Mersenne's Harmonie Universelle, volume 2 (1637). It depicts the great Lyre of the universe, governed by the divine Orpheus, who tunes all the parts of the world as he pleases. At the top right you can even see a divine hand emerging from a cloud and turning a tuning peg.

The diagram equates musical notes and intervals, on the right, with the planets and their orbits, on the left. It seeks to demonstrate that the universe is constructed according to musical principles, with the same fundamental ratios governing both. Whence the 'Music of the Spheres': the idea that the planets produce harmonious musical sounds in their movement.

Mersenne was inspired by the astronomer Johannes Kepler, who had finished his book Harmonice Mundi on this topic less than twenty years before. Kepler, in turn, was influenced by the lutenist and music theorist Vincenzo Galilei, father of Galileo Galilei.

There's an interesting article about Kepler by Andrew Brown on the Guardian website.

Wild Barley

2009-11-20T22:20:00.006+01:00

In 1596, William Barley published three books of tablature, one each for the lute, orpharion and bandora. They are among the very few printed sources of English solo lute music.

In the introduction to the orpharion book, he explains that the pieces for lute can also be played on the 'stately Orpharion', and vice versa. But since the orpharion is strung with wire strings, and the lute with gut, the orpharion requires a 'more gentle & drawing' stroke than the lute. The right hand must be easily drawn over the strings, and not 'suddenly gripped or sharply stroken as the lute is', otherwise the wire strings will clash together and make a nasty sound.

He's very insistent on this, and repeats: "sudden and sharpe as the Lute is alwaies stroken." Today, we tend to think of the lute as a gentle, sweet-sounding instrument. Perhaps we're wrong?

The sincerest form of flattery

2009-11-20T19:33:00.004+01:00

More from Adrian Le Roy's A briefe and plaine Instruction, published in London in 1574. I love these pictures, which show how to test a lute string before putting it onto the instrument. The good string appears to divide into two when it's plucked, the bad string looks all fuzzy. Note the lovingly-drawn detail: the dainty ruff at the end of the sleeves, the hank of string-gut hanging down on the right, the curly end of the string on the left. (Click the picture to see a large version).

Someone else who clearly liked the picture was Marin Mersenne, author of Harmonie Universelle, a music theory book published in Paris in 1636 and weighing in at an impressive 1,600 pages. Here's his illustration of the same thing:

Definitely a family resemblance.

Por la gracia de dios

2009-11-18T09:55:00.004+01:00

This splendid picture is from El Maestro, the book of music for vihuela by Luis Milan published in Valencia in 1536. It shows Orpheus playing his vihuela, and charming the birds and beasts. There's a city on fire in the top right of the picture.

The text around the frame reads:

El grande Orpheo / primero inventor

Por quien la vihuela / paresce en el mundo

Si el fue primero / no fue sin segundo

Pues dios es de todos / de todo hazedor.

The great Orpheus, first inventor

Through whom the vihuela appeared in the world

If he was the first, he was not without a second [?]

Since God is creator of everyone and everything.

Ruggiero Chiesa reproduces this image in his edition of El Maestro (Milan, 1974). Strangely, though, the text isn't quite the same. The last line now reads:

Porque es de todos / de todo hazedor.

Since he is creator of everyone and everything.

God has been excised. Worse, this text makes it look as though Orpheus is being credited with being the great creator. Some mistake, surely.

Howard Mayer Brown (Instrumental Music printed before 1600) also gives the Godless text. I would guess that this was printed first, that someone noticed, and insisted it was changed.

The introduction to the recent facsimile edition by the Sociedad de la Vihuela (Córdoba, 2008) lists thirteen surviving copies of the book, but doesn't draw attention to the changed text or suggest that there was any more than a single edition. Quite a mystery.

You'll find a facsimile of the book (with God) on line at the Spanish Biblioteca Nacional.

Monsters

2009-11-14T23:10:00.005+01:00

Bet you haven't seen one of these before. The cittern is normally a modest little four-course instrument, remarkably similar to a 16th century ukelele. But this monster has fourteen courses, the result of an unwise match between a cittern and a Italian chitarrone four times its size. It's the cover illustration from Thomas Robinson's New Citharen Lessons, published in London in 1609. He called his book "the sweetest Cornell of my conceited Cithering" and optimistically described the new instrument as "most fulle, sweete and easie".

In fact, most pieces in the book are for the old-fashioned four-course cittern, and there's just half a dozen pieces at the end for the big fellow. There's some satisfyingly big six- and seven-note chords, but the extra bass strings are disappointingly sparingly used. An opportunity missed.

Cittern music looks rather scary to lute players. The chords require apparently impossible stretches; but the instrument is much smaller so (I guess...) they can be reached. And the music routinely goes much higher up the fingerboard than lute music: up to fret q (the 15th fret) on occasion.

Robinson wasn't the only English lutenist to stray onto the cittern. Antony Holborne published The Cittharn Schoole in 1597. In the dedication, he calls the instrument 'this little Wanton' and the book 'my silly Citharn Schoole'. Clearly a man with a healthy sense of the ridiculous.

Role model

2009-11-14T09:39:00.002+01:00

Now, that is one hell of a

big lute
hat
playing posture
set of leg muscles
costume
beard
scowl

Thanks to Adrian Le Roy (1574) for the picture.

Tarnished reputations

2009-11-05T09:37:00.007+01:00

After being at the pains of scoring several of Dowland's compositions, I have been equally disappointed and astonished at his scanty abilities in counterpoint, and the great reputation he acquired with his cotemporaries, which has been courteously continued to him, either by the indolence or ignorance of those who have had occasion to speak of him, and who took it for granted that his title to fame, as a profound musician, was well founded.

Actually, that's not me speaking. It's Dr. Charles Burney in his General History of Music, published in 1789.

After demolishing Dowland he continues with Ferrabosco:

I have my doubts likewise concerning the genius, at least, of the second FERRABOSCO, who had the Poets and Dilettanti all on his side; but whose works, that have come under my inspection, seem wholly unworthy of a great professor... [He] published Ayres, with an accompaniment for the lute, in London, 1609, which contain as little merit of any kind as I have ever seen in productions to which the name of a master of established reputation is prefixed...

Burney is fair in his criticism and includes four pages of music by these composers so that readers can judge for themselves. He annotates the Dowland and comments that "The places in Dowland's second composition marked with a +, will be not be found very grateful to nice ears". Expressive augmented triads: absolutely not allowed. As for Ferrabosco, "the musical critic in the following plates shall have it in his power to discover such beauties in them as may have escaped my observation." Ouch.

Interestingly, neither transcription contains any lute music. To illustrate Dowland, Burney has chosen two Lamentations by Dowland, for 4 and 5 voices, published by Leighton in 1614, and little known today. In the original source (illustrated above) the 4-voice piece is a consort song, with tablature parts for lute, bandora and cittern which Burney has suppressed. His transcription of a Ferrabosco air reduces the tablature lute part to a figured bass, eliminating much of the detail. Possibly, with his emphasis on strict counterpoint as the mark of a good composer, Burney was simply unable to come to terms with the greater fluidity of polyphonic writing on the lute. Or possibly the closed world of tablature discouraged him, as it has so many others.

Temperament

2009-10-06T16:01:00.008+02:00

Oh my god. Temperament regularly arouses heated passions and arguments among lutenists, especially on the lute mailing list. Intemperate is more like it. The arguments are futile because there is, mathematically, no right answer to the question of how different notes should be tuned relative to one another, so the different temperaments (tuning systems) are all flawed compromises. So it's largely a matter of which flawed compromise system you prefer, tinged with a little information about the systems used in the past.

Equal temperament (boo, hiss) is the modern standard. Mean temperament (1/5 comma, 1/6 comma, ...), just intonation, Pythagorean/ natural temperament, Valotti, Werckmeister, .... The debate rages. There are even i-phone applications for different historical tuning systems.

Refer elsewhere for more detailed explanations, for example Stuart Isacoff's book Temperament, aimed at non-specialist readers.

I'm not aware that the issue ever arises with modern guitarists. Firstly, fixed frets mean there's nothing to be done anyway. Secondly, guitarists seem to have accepted equal temperament long ago. Early nineteenth-century experiments with enharmonic guitars with crazy side-stepped fret dispositions gave impractical, not to mention unplayable, results.

On the lute, despite its movable frets, even the compromises have to be compromised. Each fret, as on the guitar, has to serve for five different notes. For example, the first fret on a G lute gives G#, C#, F#, A# and D#. Or, rather, ten different notes, since it also has to serve for Ab, Db, Gb, Bb and Eb. In systems other than equal temperament, these are not the same notes as the sharp equivalents. Which means, basically, that any tuning system other than equal temperament is shot to pieces.

A particular problem: Bb on the third course and F# on the fourth course require the first fret to be in different places. Both notes are frequently needed in the lute's favourite key of G minor. What to do? Some players have tried placing so-called tastini (little frets) just behind the real first fret, to allow both notes to be achieved. My own limited experience of tastini is that they are a serious impediment to accurate playing.

So, I'm with Vincentio Galilei (father of Galileo G) in advocating equal temperament. He put his theory into practice in his Libro d'intavolatura di liuto in 1584, with a mighty set of Passemezzos, Romanescas and Saltarellos, written in all the major and minor keys. This was a full century before the birth of J.S. Bach, he of the Well-Tempered Klavier. Various composers for baroque guitar (e.g. Bartolotti, Pellegrini) wrote similar cycles in the seventeenth century.

To be fair, I should allow the other side to put their case. Here are two well-written articles from Martin Shepherd and David van Ooijen. I'm not yet convinced, though...

Musica Ficta

2009-10-05T14:15:00.003+02:00

Musica ficta is the practice in pre-1600 music of adding non-notated accidentals at cadences and elsewhere, usually to avoid ungracious harmonic and melodic intervals. Practical problem for performers, especially modern ones who have not been brought up with the medieval hexachord system: knowing where, how, and how much to do this.

Lute tablature comes galloping to the rescue! In tablature, pitches of notes are shown precisely. So a composer or arranger for the lute had to show his musica ficta decisions explicitly. This means that arrangements for lute of music for voices or other instruments can offer solutions, or at least insights, into musica ficta practice. There are hundreds of such arrangements, of both sacred and secular polyphonic music, throughout the sixteenth century.

Firstly: on this evidence, music ficta undoubtedly existed. And was heavily used.

But, secondly: there are no universal rules. Where different composers have written versions of the same piece, they often adopt different musica ficta solutions at the same points. For example, a cadence going from e-g-c to d-a-d might have E flat and C natural in the first chord, or E natural and C sharp.

Or even a mixture of both. Albert de Rippe's version of Janequin's chanson D'un seul soleil in this context consistently uses a chord of E flat - G - C sharp, with an extra A in the middle for good measure. An early example of what, a couple of centuries later, came to be known as a German sixth, sounding strikingly out of place in 1552 but undoubtedly authentic. And the first of his two fantaisies for guitar (also 1552: yes, the guitar has been around for a while) has some even more exuberant scrunches in it: accidental logic taken to extremes.

Howard Mayer Brown

2009-10-04T15:42:00.007+02:00

Instrumental Music Printed Before 1600: A Bibliography

An dry title for an astonishing book, first published in 1965 by the Harvard University Press. Howard Mayer Brown's aim was to catalogue and describe all of the instrumental music published before 1600. It has entries in chronological order for some 400 books, giving a brief description of each book and a full listing of the pieces of music in it. Equally valuable are a set of indexes (indices?) by library, type of notation, performing medium, composer, and titles of works, allowing easy access to the contents through different routes.

Now that these music books are widely available in facsimile, printed and online, Brown's book takes on a new life as a guide to these publications. The sparse examples he gives of the modern reprints available in 1965 show just how much things have moved on since then.

Index III is gratifying. It shows 206 volumes containing music for solo lute and only 76 for keyboard solo. Plus further volumes for similar instruments such as cittern, guitar, or vihuela. Music for other instruments is almost all generic ensemble music: there is very little that specifies named instruments, and very little solo music.

Brown's book is still available in a good-quality reprint from www.iUniverse.com

p.s. I've just discovered a review from 1966, when the book first came out, which starts: "This is a volume that I would not hesitate to call magnificent". Quite.

Concordances

2009-10-04T15:40:00.003+02:00

A nice name for a horrid phenomenon (pace Howard Mayer Brown). A concordance is another version of the same piece in a different source. A table of concordances is when someone goes through a book of music and lists the known alternative versions of every piece in it. A real enthusiast will highlight the differences between the different versions.

Tables of concordances feature heavily in modern publications of lute music, whether facsimiles or new editions. Of course they have a scholarly purpose. But they sit like a lead weight, dull, depressing, sapping energy, turning the publication into a cataloguing exercise rather than a musical one. And making the musical reader feel somehow inferior if he doesn't know his way round the arcane abbreviations for libraries, manuscripts, folios and sigla which are used to locate the pieces.

Worse, one forms the distinct impression that publications can be delayed, or simply fail ever to appear, because of the enormous time and labour required to assemble this catalogue of stuff that no-one wants to read. Not good.

The old jokes are the best ones

2009-09-29T10:09:00.002+02:00

Heard the one about the lutenist who spent longer tuning his instrument than he did playing it? Thought so. Fresh, witty, apt. Not bad for a joke that's been around for almost three hundred years.

Johann Mattheson in his Neu-eröffnete Orchestre from 1713 wrote: ‘Denn wenn ein Lauteniste 80. Jahr alt wird / so hat er gewiβ 60. Jahr gestimmet.’ (When a lutenist reaches the age of 80, he must surely have spend 60 years tuning.) To which he added: ‘Das ärgste ist / daβ unter 100. insonderheit Liebhabern / die keine Profession davon machen / kaum 2. capable sind / recht reine zu stimmen.’ (The worst is that among 100 amateurs, those that do not make a profession of it, hardly two will be able to tune really well.)

Goethe repeats the joke, at the expense of his dad Johann Caspar Goethe (1710-1782) who was a keen lutenist. In "Dichtung und Wahrheit", Buch 8, he writes:

"mein Vater ... stimmte seine Laute länger, als er darauf spielte." (my father ... tuned his lute for longer than he played it).

To be fair, by this late stage in the lute's development it was a multi-string monster. A thirteen-course German baroque lute has 26 strings.

Biodiversity 1: Peaceful co-existence

2006-10-08T12:40:00.000+02:00

***details still to be checked and completed***

Biodiversity is a Good Thing, in music as in biology. Throughout the sixteenth century the lute lived in peaceful co-existence with numerous other plucked species, now largely forgotten. Let's meet some of them.

When Francesco da Milano published his first book of tablature in 1536 he described the music as being for "viola o vero lauto". Which does not mean "viola or true lute" but simply "viola or lute". This isn't a viola in the modern sense, but the viola da mano ("hand"), an instrument similar to to the lute but shaped more like a guitar. The name distinguishes it from the viola da gamba ("leg"), which was held between the legs and played with a bow. The viola da mano makes frequent appearances in Baldassare Castiglione's classic manual of life at court in Italy, Il Cortegiano (15xx) . Thomas Hobie's English version of the book (15xx) translates viola da mano as "lute", evidence that the viola remained localised.

But it did hop over the water to Spain, where it was known as the vihuela de mano. Maybe not surprising, since much of eastern Spain was under Italian control at the time. [check details] There was no lute music published in Spain in the sixteenth century, but seven substantial books for vihuela exist, with evocative titles:

[table of titles]

Narvaez (or Narbaez, as he spelt it) really did name his Seys libros del Delphin after a dolphin. The frontispiece shows a splendid sea-creature, ridden by the mythological Greek [musician] Arion.

William Barley's A new Booke of Tabliture (1596), the first of its kind to be published in England, presented music for the lute, orpharion and bandora. Helpfully, he provides pictures and descriptions of each instrument.

The orpharion was tuned like a lute but had wire strings and a strangely diagonal bridge and frets. Presumably its name derives from Orpheus. It's not clear why Barley assigned some pieces to lute and others to orpharion since there's no clear stylistic difference between the two sets. When John Dowland published his first three books of songs shortly afterwards, he specified that the accompaniments could be played on lute or orpharion. It didn't last much longer.

The bandora (or pandora) is another wire-strung beast, bigger than the lute and with an idiosyncratic tuning. It's probably best known as one of the band in Thomas Morley's consort lessons (1599), written for the hard-to-find combination of flute, treble viol, bass viol, lute, bandora and cittern. Here they are, happily thrumming away at a feast for Sir Henry Unton, Queen Elizabeth's ambassador to France, in 1596.

The cittern enjoyed a surprisingly long and varied life (surprising, that is, if you have heard one). Like a flat-backed mandolin with ukulele tendencies, the standard cittern was confusingly tuned b-g-d'-e' [show this in staff notation] and was to be found hanging on the walls in barbers' shops. Lutenists inexplicably flocked to write for it, including Sixtus Kärgel (Renovata Cythara, 1578), Anthony Holborne (The Cittharn School, 1597) and Thomas Robinson, whose New Citharen Lessons of 1609 includes pieces for a scarcely-imaginable monster 14-course cittern. The instrument evolved into the English Guitar, a wire-strung instrument tuned to a C major chord, for which the famed Italian violinist Francesco Geminiani wrote a method (1760), and in Germany into the exquisitely named Hamburger Citrinchen.

But these are mainstream compared with the penorcon or stump, varieties of bass cittern about which virtually nothing is known. Or the gittern, on no account to be confused with the cittern.

The ultimate predator, the guitar, occupied a modest place in the sixteenth century. It was an undernourished creature with four pairs of strings. Lutenists, most of them French for some reason, indulgently published music for the harmless little fellow: Pierre Attaignant, Guillaume Morlaye, Adrien le Roy, Albert de Rippe.
Little did they realise what they were nurturing, and how the guitar would knock the lute over the head in the following century, becoming the favourite instrument of the Sun King, Louis XIV, himself.

The Tortoise

2006-09-25T14:15:00.000+02:00

The frontispiece of Alonso de Mudarra's Tres Libros de Musica, published in Sevilla in 1546, shows the god Mercury, recognisable by his winged helmet, his caduceus (a winged staff with a pair of snakes) and his lyre. The lyre has legs and a head. It's a tortoise, and none too happy.

The Latin quotation below the picture is from Horace's Ode 1:10, To Mercury.

Te canam magni Iovis, et deorum
Nuntium, Curvaeque lirae parentem

I sing to you, messenger of great Jove and of the gods, and father to the curved lyre

Precocious Mercury, on the day of his birth, scooped out the insides of a tortoise, stretched leather across the front, added gut strings and thus invented the lyre, which he later had to give to Apollo in exchange for the cattle which Mercury had stolen from him.

Which explains, after a fashion, how Testudo (meaning tortoise) came to be the Latin name for the lute in the sixteenth century. Emmanuel Adriaensen, Joachim van den Hove, Jean-Baptiste Besard and others described their music as being for the Testudo. Giovanni Pacolini published songs for a family of three different-sized tortoises in Tribus testudinibus ludenda Carmina (Louvain, 1564). After Georg Leopold Fuhrmann's splendidly titled Testudo Gallo-Germanica (Nürnberg, 1615) there was nowhere left to go and the tradition died out.

Other classically-minded composers used the equivalent Greek term Chelys (from chelone, 'tortoise'). The motto, Non vi sed chely, from the title page of Matthias Reymann's Noctes Musicae (Leipzig, 1598), echoes Willet's Emblemata (Cambridge, 1592).

Non vi sed virtute, non armis sed arte paritur victoria

Not by force but by virtue, not with arms but with art is victory won

In a neat extension of the animal symbolism, the picture shows Orpheus taming a wild beast with his music.

Postscript:

Turtels & twins, courts brood, a heauenly paier

This line from Dowland's famous lute song Fine Knacks for Ladies (1600) refers, misleadingly, not to the Testudo but to the turtle dove.