Dear All, I have been looking at the first Prelude in Attaingnant's 1529 collection of solo lute music. The piece also appears in the Siena Lute Book, ff. 17r-17v. Does anyone know of any other concordance?
There are a few insignificant differences between the two sources like notes on the wrong line, where the two sources can be used to correct each other's mistakes. One can use one's common sense with regard to parallel fifths to correct a couple of dodgy notes. Apart from these little things there are some major differences, where Attaingnant apparently misses out great chunks of music. One of these chunks contains a sudden weird, and apparently unnecessary modulation to D major, and one wonders if it really should be there. Did Attaingnant deliberately leave out bars which seemed to him corrupt, or was it the Siena scribe, who accidentally added these extra bars, and they were never in Attaingnant's exemplar? Is the Siena version entirely plausible? It's all rather puzzling really. It is a jolly nice piece, not too hard to play, and sounds particularly lovely on my bass lute. If anyone can tell me more about this piece, I would be very grateful. Best wishes, Stewart McCoy. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
