>Yes, Francesco's use of finger picks has been known since the 1980s when >Jesse Ann Owens discovered a letter dated 1524 from a Ferrarese diplomatic >in Rome The writer described a performance by Francesco. He is said to have >played with two silver thimbles on the inside of which were quills. It >does not say on which fingers they were attached. The sound was said to >resembl;e a harpsichord. It would seem that the sound of the plectrum lute >was being preserved by use of these finger picks. (And plectrum playing >continued into the 16th century, perhaps especially for lute ensembles.)
Didn't you say there was another letter also? I thought there were two references to his using thimbles. Hard to know what 'on the inside' means for the quills. The implications of Francesco playing with quills are perhaps potentially upsetting to our consensis of what a lute is supposed to sound like. How late were quills used? Since most of what he wrote was polyphonic, it raises many questions. Petrobono and the generation previous to Francesco were thought to have been mainly monophonic, I thought, within a duo or ensemble setting. Polyphonic plectrum playing?; wear marks indicating how close to the bridge lutenists played; the riddle of stringing (still not been solved IMHO); our concept of lute sound may be very different from what the reality was. >Other lutenists were known to use such finger picks (for wire-strung >onstruments?), and some are listed in inventories of musical instruments >and called "Lute Nails." I wonder if any have survived. And what did a >thimble look like in 16th-century Italy? SO interesting and exciting! >And Ed, do you know what CDs Crtawford Young has issued? I just have one >of his CDs titled "Intabulations." Also I heard that he was doing a >facsimile of the Pesaro Manuscript. Do you know if it has been published? >It contains some plectrum polyphony (yes), as well as other plectrum >pieces. =46rom http://harmoniamundi.com/hmUS/featured_artist.asp?Artist=3D251 Crawford Young graduated from New England Conservatory in Boston in 1976 where he played classical guitar, lute and tenor banjo. He came into contact with Thomas Binkley at Stanford University in 1977 and began a three-year collaboration with Ensemble Sequentia in Cologne in 1978. Since 1982 he has taught lute and medieval music interpretation and performance at the Schola Cantorum in Basel. He was a founding member of both the Ferrara Ensemble and the Boston-based Ensemble PAN (Project Ars Nova). Numerous CD recordings and publications (including, for example, in the Basler Jahrbuch f=FCr historische Musikpraxis) about the repertoire and instruments of the fifteenth century show him to be one of the leading experts in this field. As such, he also steers the Ferrara Ensemble on its continuing voyage of discovery. The year 2002 will see the publication of a volume of Sources of Early Lute Music in Facsimile, edited and provided with an extensive commentary by Crawford Young and Martin Kirnbauer (in the "Prattica Musicale" series of the SCB, Amadeus Verlag, Winterthur). Discography : Agricola , Ambrogio , Anonymous , Busnois , Dalza , Ghizeghem , Isaac , Japart , Josquin Desprez , Lapicida , Orto , Roellrin , Spinacino Release Date: August 2002 Amours amours amours I have some PAN and the Agricola CD. Really fabulous stuff, and my idea of beautiful singing. >By the way Jessie has published a fascinating book _Composers at Work: The >Craft of Musical Composition, 1450-1600_ (OUP, 1997). It includes some >remarks about how the lute was sometimes used as a means for composing. >That is, Palestrina may have composed "at the lute," and he even previewed >the mass for a patron by playing it on the lute. It boggles the mind. The lute is such a difficult instrument. I would choose a keyboard over the lute for composing vocal music, - if I had any proficiency at it. The standards on the lute must have been very high. > She also tracked down >some pieces if lute music that may be compositional sketches. There is not >too much material like that because it is thought composers first wrote a >piece oin a wax slate, and then when the composition was complete, ink it >into a manuscript (or intabulate it?). > >arthur I had heard about slates, but I didn't know they were wax. I wonder what they wrote on them with. I'm assuming they worked out their compositions in a kind of score and then copied them to part books. cheers, -- Ed Durbrow Saitama, Japan http://www9.plala.or.jp/edurbrow/ --
