"Sean Smith" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> schrieb: > The Spagna by Francesco is a different animal from most spagnas that I > have seen.
a while ago, Stewart and me had a little chat about the Spagna. Stewart, I hope you won't mind me forwarding your mail to the list? Stewart wrote: The important thing about La Spagna is that it is essentially a tenor line, not a cantus. When it was commonly used at the end of the 15th century, shawm players would have improvised above and below the Spagna melody. Presumably that is why Francesco da Milano treated it the way he did. At least, I suspect his Lute 2 part was originally for three instruments, and he simply intabulated them for the lute. Then he added Lute 1 as a sort of "bastarda" part, running through the texture as the viola bastarda would have done later on in the 16th century. A few years ago I spotted something very interesting. All the Spagna settings I know have the Spagna melody somewhere in the middle of the texture as a tenor, apart from Diego Ortiz, who uses it as a bass line. I always think of this as something which shows how music changed during the 16th century. In the 15th and early 16th century composers often built their compositions around slow-moving tenor lines. Ortiz wanted to use the Spagna melody, but by the 1550's music was composed more in relation to the bass, with the emphasis more on harmony than polyphony, so he used La Spagna as a bass, not a tenor, and his bass viol divisions were conceived above that bass line. To that extent Ortiz has more in common with Christopher Simpson 100 years later, than he has with his immediate predecessors. Best wishes, Mathias -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
