Matanya Ophee at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > 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
The translated excerpt in your article says the lute has declined (or is in decline, or is declining) which is not the same thing; also it seems to say that the theorbo and guitar are doing well. It is not a model of clarity. > 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? I'd think you'd want to know about after 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. Maybe. This opens up a whole new subject, and a fascinating one. It's clear enough that publication indicates a perceived market (or, less likely, that the musician or patron had money to burn), but it is not always true that lack of publication shows the absence of a market. I'm sure that a musician as famous as Weiss could have sold published editions, since less famous lutenists did, but outside of one piece in Telemann's Getreue Music-Meister, he never did. Why not? Maybe the answer can be found in Vivaldi, the most famous musician of the late baroque, who stopped publishing his music about 1730 (he had a dozen or so opus numbers out by 1730) because he could make more money selling manuscripts. This is much like a famous graphic artist selling one-of-a-kind or limited-edition works instead of publishing or mass-producing them. Rarity drives up the price. And of course, some famous players (as late as Paganini) wanted to keep their music to themselves, regarding it as a trade secret. This is all by way of question rather than answer. Anyway, we can be making a mistake if evaluate the economics of music dissemination in other times with the assumptions of our own time. I don't know, BTW, what the numbers of lute manuscripts and publications in 18th-century France or elsewhere were. I do know that if Campion was prophesying the end of the lute, he'd be proven right by about 1800. HP
