Monsters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.