I already put my two cents worth before, but I would like to add a few more comments:
As many have said, as you get more and more familiar with lute tablature, you can actually hear the pitches, and determine the voice leading quite well. You must also remember that most of us lutenists, have come to the lute via the classical guitar, and as such, were used to reading staff notation for guitar, keeping the pitch of the guitar in mind. When we switched to the lute, had we had to immediately use staff notation with the lute pitch in mind, we would have been lost. Over the years we all become so acquainted with our instruments, that we can actually play directly from staff notation (over two staves = true pitch). To this day, I cannot play a lute piece on the guitar if not transcribed in E tuning (unless I use tablature) but I can play the same piece on the lute in G tuning....in other words, I cannot play as a transposed instrument (like the saxophone in B flat where you actually play a C to get B -flat...or something like that.....) Tablature is not, in my opinion, an inferior system, it is a nice complement to other notation systems that exist. And really, it doesn`t make sense to transcribe all of this lute music into notation when the tablature is right there for the learning...... Bruno Montreal, Canada lutenist since 1978 Howard Posner wrote: >It's no surprise that Tom Beck, who has spent more than half a century with >staff notation and a few weeks with tablature, would be less at home with >tablature. > >If you play from tab enough, you will start to hear it, recognize tab signs >with pitches (just as you learned to recognize those funny little dots as >pitches), and see the voice-leading. > >HP > > > > > > >
