At 12:32 PM 12/9/2003 -0800, Howard Posner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Matanya Ophee at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > May be you are right. May be I should have been more specific and say that > > these comments were "an indication of a general feelings > > [sic] of malaise regarding tablature" in France at the specific time frame > > of 1697 to 1716. And thank you for the [sic]. Fixed it. > >Even so, I think you'd be making too much of them. It normally takes at >least six comments to establish an official general feeling of malaise, but >of course it requires a bit more among the French, who are looser with their >opinions.
I think you got something there, but I am not sure you want to pursue this argument to its inevitable conclusion. The main problem we all have in historical research, is that there are not too many extant sources for any particular issue, and more often than not, conclusions are arrived at by extrapolation of the available data. What was the term for that concept? Postmodern Phenomenological Deconstructivism or something like that. Give you an example. There are a few documentary sources which established that in a double octave course on the baroque guitar, the high octave string was on the side of the thumb. There are no sources which indicate that this course was ever played by itself, without the associated bourdon. That has not stopped an entire movement of baroque guitarists to assume that it was in fact meant to be so played. Are they making too much of it? and then, too much of what? And then take the issue of iconographic evidence in which no one is able to state if the picture was made by the artist in reference to a real live musician, or in reference to a staged model who had no idea about lute technique, or in reference to another picture in which the matter of placing the hands, fingers, course, frets etc, was determined by the artist in what can be best described as artistic licence. There has been a tremendous amount of traffic in this list about such issues, often based on one or two pictures. Are we making too much of it? here is one picture you may not have seen before: http://www.orphee.com/lute/lute-player.jpg I cna just imagine the sort of conclusions that can be made of it. So, with the addition of the Milleran quote furnished by Fred, we now have three commentaries by French musicians about the dangers of tablature to the general musicianship of the player. It could be said, and I would not be able to argue against it, that each of these musicians, Milleran, Perrine and Campion were not talking as witnesses of their time, but only expressing their own personal bias. If we accept this point of view, we then must accept that every single musician of the time was acting as an individual with an axe to grind and not as an impartial observer of society. Accepting such a view would require us to discard about 90% of what we have come to regard as the basic tenets of HIP performance. >One analogy would be the periodic copyright/upload/download flareups we have >around here. An observer might extrapolate from the heat and number of the >posts that it's a huge hot-button issue, but in fact perhaps 95% of the lute >listers expressed no opinion at all, and may have no strong opinion on the >subject. Excellent analogy. Which, if carried to its logical conclusion, would tell us that we have no way of knowing what was the opinion, performance practice, musical output of all those musicians who never posted anything on the bandwidth of the Renaissance and baroque period. Bach and Weiss are the greatest? of course they are, because they have been some of the more prolific posters of their time. But what do we know about the lute works of lesser figures such as Graupner, Buxtehude, Froberger, etc? and by etc. I mean all those composers whose existence in the time frame is not even known. Some of them manage to sneak through and come up to the surface once in a while, many, and we have no idea how many exactly, never do. They never wrote anything for the lute? perhaps. But we shall never know for sure, What we do know for sure is that no such works by them is known to exist. IOW, they could have been lurkers. >I have no statistical data worth knowing. But I can hardly miss things like >the increase in lute players making a living performing, mostly as continuo >players; the way that theorbos, archlutes and guitars are taken for granted >in baroque ensembles and recordings, the publicity push Harmonia Mundi USA >has thrown behind Paul O'Dette, or the presence of O'Dette and Stubbs as >directors of the Boston Early Music Festival. The increase you notice is not in the number of players, but in the number of early music ensemble. Back in the old days there was the Noah Greenberg group, and not much else. As for the performing and recording lutenists, I would wager that between Michel Podolsky, Eugen Dombois, Suzanne Bloch, Stanley Buetens, Konrad Raggosnig, Walter Gerwig, Julian Bream and Narciso Yepes, to mention the better known lutenists of the previous generations, there were just as many professional lute performers then as there are today. >You'll note that you and I are focusing on two different things: you on the >players of solo music, and I on their place in the larger musical world. But the good question is if these ensemble players actually make a living at playing continuo, or are they simply called on for an occasional gig. Do you know any particular lutenist who makes a full time living doing that? >Perhaps the difference is in seeing the lute world as essentially a subset >of the guitar world or as a subset of the early music world. Depends of who is doing the seeing. If it is the guitar world or the early music world looking at the lute, perceptions may vary. Many guitarists would be also excellent lute players, and obviously they would regard the lute as subset of the guitar. On the other hand, some of them may regard the guitar as a subset of the lute. As for the early music world, I am not so sure. The fact that Stubbs and O'Dette are directing the BEMF, is wonderful news, but how many other such festivals world wide are directed by lutenists? Matanya Ophee Editions Orphe'e, Inc., 1240 Clubview Blvd. N. Columbus, OH 43235-1226 Phone: 614-846-9517 Fax: 614-846-9794 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.orphee.com
