At 04:25 PM 12/9/2003 -0800, Howard Posner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > 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. > >No, because a consensus, or a majority, or an institution, or a societal >norm, or accepted performance practice, is the sum total of a lot of >individual biases and axes to grind. Of course. But we must understand that we draw this consensus today, based on the sources that are available to us today. Since we have no way of knowing anything about the Renaissance and Baroque lurkers, we can never be sure that the consensus we think exists in the available sources, also existed in the exchanges the living lutenists made among themselves. Some of these exchanges survived, most did not. >So take Perrine. If you have one late 17th-century French commentator who >dislikes tablature, you have one piece of evidence about how tablature was >viewed in late 17th-century France. What other evidence is there? If there >are volumes of late 17th-century or early 18th-century French solo lute >music written in staff notation instead of tablature, they would be evidence >that Perrine was observing a trend, or starting one. But the absence of >volumes of late 17th-century or early 18th-century French solo lute music >written in staff notation instead of tablature is evidence that he was just >a guy who didn't like tablature. I agree. But the fact remains that within 19 years after the appearance of the Perrine book, Campion stated that the lute was done for. That is a fairly powerful statement and we really have only one way to verify it. How many lute books in tablature were printed for general consumption between 1697 and 1716? And I would suggest that manuscripts that can be dated to that time period are not a reliable measure of the popularity of the instrument. A manuscript would indicate a single owner, or a succession of a single owners over time. A printed book indicates an existing market. > > The increase you notice is not in the number of players, but in the number > > of early music ensemble. > >Unless one lute player is playing all the gigs with all of the ensembles, >there has to be an increase in lute players to go with the increase in the >number of ensembles. yea, but do they make a living doing this? > > 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. > >I couldn't sleep at night if I took your money on a sucker bet like that. >Were I a gambling man (I'm not), I might take bets on whether there are more >professional lutenists in London now than there were in the entire world >forty years ago. Probably true, if your definition of a professional lutenist in London today depends on counting on anyone who owns a lute and produced a vanity CD. I would suggest that the way to measure this, is to walk into Border's or Tower Records, and see how many lute CDs are available in the bins. Since we cannot walk into similar stores in 1956 or so, we have to go by existing discographies. In 1990, I published a discography of guitar records. It includes a section of lute recordings, mostly LPs that were produced before 1990. The picture it gives is illuminating. 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
