Dear Taco, Arto and all,
at the end of this letter you'll find the summary of my essay in Recercare.
Of course you can find very exhaustive examples (original tablatures and
their possible transcriptions in different tunings) in the essay. It's a
quite complex matter, but if you play the examples with a 6 renaissance lute
you can instantly understand how much this 'new' system to play continuo is
a very much efficacious system.
These are two tipical passages with 'octave tuning':
ex. 1, Roma, Biblioteca Corsiniana, Mus P 15, 'Regole piu' necessarie, et
universali per accompagnare il basso continuo con l'arcileuto, o
gravicembalo' (Roma 7 settembre 1720).
--------------- 2 ------
- 4 ---- 4 -------------
-- 4 ---- 3 -------------
-- 3 ---- 2 --- 3 -------
-------- 0 ----2 ------
-------------- 2 ------
ex. 2, Tokio, Nanki Music Library, Ohki Collection, ms. N-4/42,
| | | |
-- c ----- ------- | ---- c -------
-- c -------- a -- | ---- c -------
-- d -------- c -- | ---- d -------
------- e --- d -- | --------------
-- a ------------- | -------------
------------- e -- | ---- c -------
These kind of passages are always the same and they are very usual and
frequent 'mistakes'.
I really think that they are very much ingegnous solutions. Please, play and
compare 'unison tuning' with 'octave tuning'. It's impossible to play them
with the traditional tuning, too much mistakes. It's impossible to have a
good melodic line, voices and right solutions for the obbligato (dissonances
and 'sensibile' [g#] ). On the contrary, with 'octave tuning' all parts are
good and chords with 6 notes too. They used inner notes to create a
continuity in the armonic
tissue. This means a little more work for index (right hand). You can use
'arpeggio tiorbesco' to put in evidence inner parts, too.
As you can easily see that the positions are very different from traditional
and correspondent positions with an archlute 'unison tuning'. This means
that italian continuo players (between late XVII and early XVIII) used
'octave tuning' and different positions from ours. Of course, historical
examples are more than these. They found and used a such system to play in
'full playing' style. And I think that they used 'acciaccatura playing' too
(a typical way to use dissonances) as this tuning allows it. See these
(mine) positions and cadences:
7
--- 0 --------|--- 0 -------|------
--- 0 --- 0 --|--- 0 -------|------
--- 0 --------|--- 0 -------|------
--- 2 --- 3 --|--- 1 --- 0 --|------
--- 0 --- 2 --|--- 2 --- 3 --|------
-------------|--- 0 --- 1 --|------
In this examples you have dissonant chords with 8 or 9 notes. I studied this
system very deeply and I found more solutions very right to play in late
Italian baroque style.
If someone wish to buy the journal please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
IMPORTANT: the facsimile of roman ms. Mus P 15 is printed in the Appendix
of the essay.
Best wishes,
Marco Pesci
Nuove proposte di prassi esecutiva fondate su un inedito trattato di basso
continuo per arciliuto, Recercare VIII 1996, 5-57.
New light shed on performance practice by an unpublished treatise on
continuo playing for the archlute, Recercare VIII 1996, 5-57.
Summary
An anonymous, and unpublished, treatise on the realisation of thoroughbass
for the archlute is preserved in the library of the Accademia Nazionale dei
Lincei e Corsiniana of Rome. Its title can be translated as "The most
necessary and general rules for accompanying the thoroughbass on the
archlute or harpsichord, 2 September 1720 Rome, chosen from various authors
and presented with their own examples". It forms part of the miscellaneous
manuscript Primi principij della musica (Mus. P 15), the content of which is
listed in table 1. A particularly valuable aspect of these Regole is their
application to the lute, given the extremely scant number of Italian sources
on the subject. Moreover, actual realisations of the basses accompany the
theoretical exposition of the rules: a practically unique feature in the
lute literature.
Considerable evidence suggests that the Regole can be attributed to Girolamo
Chiti, the Sienese composer and theorist and the future chaplain at the
Corsini chapel: first, a glance at the entire manuscript collection shows
that the part on thoroughbass is not a separate entity but connected to the
two following sections (which are explicitly signed by Chiti); second, the
three sections are very close in date and ordered chronologically; third,
all the examples of the second section were intended to be realised in lute
tablature (though this was never completed); finally, the three parts have
the same watermark. The three parts would appear, therefore, to make up a
single work. Furthermore, in 1720 (i.e. at the time the Regole were drawn
up) Chiti was engaged in a great deal of teaching work at the Collegio degli
Orfanelli of Rome, so almost certainly the entire collection was drawn up
for the musical training of his young students. It is also interesting to
observe that Chiti's works composed before his engagement as maestro di
cappella of the Roman basilica of St John Lateran in 1726 (the works are
listed in table 2) make extensive use, in the continuo ensemble, of
instruments from the lute family. Finally, Chiti's library included a number
of important treatises (both manuscript and printed), so we may plausibly
conjecture that he had made a complete study of the art of continuo
accompaniment.
Though the thirty rules are expressed in a clear, straightforward manner and
offer an excellent guide, the main source of interest lies in the
accompanying realisations. Of a total of 148 examples, about 40 pose
problems of one kind or another. In almost all of these realisations there
are parallel fifths and octaves, omitted resolutions and unwarranted leaps.
We can exclude a priori that such "errors" were the result of either
contrapuntal incompetence or ignorance of the lute (in fact quite the
opposite was the case) or that they were accidental (for the same type of
"error" appears too frequently). We are forced, therefore, to recognise that
the author was fully aware of what he was doing. One also wonders why, in a
practical manual for beginners of the art, these solutions were adopted when
more "correct" alternatives were equally possible without making the
exercise any more difficult. The answer, in my opinion, could be as simple
as it is illuminating: one of the two strings of the 4th, 5th and 6th
courses was tuned an octave higher. Though the widespread modem practice of
using unison courses is well suited to the solo repertory, it is perfectly
possible that lutenists - perhaps from the second half of the seventeenth
century - also used a slightly different tuning, one better suited to the
needs of continuo playing.
A comparison of the two types of tuning (example 1) immediately suggests
what the difference in sound would be, because the doubling of the 4th and
5th courses merges with the melodic line of the upper parts, enriches the
harmony and simplifies the links by favouring speed and comfort (examples 2
and 3). Examples 4 and 5 show an impressive effect obtained from octave
courses. Recourse to octave-courses also explains the apparent
contradictions in Rule 8 (example 6). In example 9 octave tuning allows one
both to resolve the seventh and to avoid parallel fifths. In various cases
(example 10) a more satisfactory sonority is obtained. Quite clearly,
therefore, octave tuning not only determines a significant change and
increase in timbre and sonority, but also simplifies certain chord positions
and cadential resolutions; at the same time, the actual number of notes
played is stretched to the utmost limits of the lute, thereby gaining the
maximum result with the minimum of effort.
The reasons that induced to adopt this tuning can be plausibly related to
developments in continuo practice many years earlier, above all in Rome. A
so-called "full" style had become widespread, whereby keyboard players were
advised to "use as many keys as possible in order to obtain the greatest
possible harmony". In this respect, octave doubling on the archlute would be
viewed as a highly desirable, and very convenient, means of achieving such
"fullness of harmony". We know that over several decades Pasquini was in
close contact with a number of contemporary lutenists, so it is quite
possible that the personality of the great composer (and continuo expert)
made an impact on theim choices. It is indeed hard to imagine that the
lutenists, accustomed as they were to the bizarre tunings and realisations
of the theorbo and guitar, should expect the archlute to realise a
contrapuntally pure continuo line (considemed by that date "the former,
plain manner of playing").
Here it is appropriate to remember that many continuo realisations (of
various kinds) for lute and theorbo survive in Italian prints and
manuscripts. In one manuscript preserved in Perugia, convincing concordances
can be directly related to Chiti's rules; in particular, certain passages
and cadence formulas used in the "ceccone" and "mutanze" show procedures
linked to the resolution of G# (3rd fret of 4th course) and C# (4th fret of
3rd course); see example 12 and figure 4. Another very interesting
manuscript, preserved in Tokyo, contains six Italian arias with the
accompaniment realised in French tablature; hitherto it has been impossible
to establish whether they were principally conceived for the English theorbo
or for the archlute. Performance on an octave-course archlute is clearly
more effective (example 14); whereas two passages that can only be explained
by octave tuning could even definitively rule out the possibility of theorbo
performance (example 15). The decisive example, however, is furnished by Se
risolvi abbandonarmi, a reworking of Handel's aria of the same name in
Floridante (example 16). It seems justifiable to conclude that octave tuning
was known and practised also in England, where Italian music (and
particularly that of Corelli and the Roman school) was extensively
cultivated. This could open up new opportunities of determining the exact
instrumentation of the tablature accompaniments in other English
manuscripts. John Michael Wright's portrait of A lady with a theorbo (figure
5 and 6) may in fact be showing an archlute with octaves in the 4th, 5th and
6th courses.
We also know that, alongside "full playing", there was also a widely spread
manner of "acciaccatura playing". As example 17 shows, perhaps the most
convincing proof of the efficacy of the new tuning is that it finally allows
one to realise this important aspect of the Italian continuo style, one that
has hitherto posed insoluble problems for twentieth-century lutenists.
It is important to specify that the new tuning not only indicates the type
of strings to be used on the archlute but also directly affects the
fingering and realisation of certain chords (thus modifying the performance
practice of present-day lutenists). At the present state of knowledge it is
impossible to give precise indications as to when or where these changes to
archlute tuning were introduced, or for that matter on who introduced them
or the extent of their diffusion. But the surprising fact is that octave
tuning adapts itself perfectly to both "full playing" and "acciaccatura
playing" and that so many elements make it an important feature of the
contemporary Italian continuo style, a style of long duration that spread to
many European countries and one that must certainly have involved lutenists
as well.
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