Dear Stephen, It is, of course, possible to add a note here or there to fast, jolly Irish tunes, such as those in O'Neill's collection, but by and large I don't think those tunes lend themselves very well to divisions. Improvising around a tune (altering notes here and there, but staying largely with the same note values), or creating a countermelody, might have their place, but not divisions. The idea of divisions is to create variety by dividing notes into shorter note values. Irish jigs and reels are so fast, that you don't have a lot of time to put in extra notes. If you do, the music slows down to give you time to do it. Those pieces are complete in themselves; divisions would tend to clutter, rather than enhance.
It has often been observed that the addition of extra notes by musicians, or extra steps by dancers, has the effect of slowing music down over the years. The saraband started life as a fast, lively dance, and ended up as a very slow one. The galliards printed by Pierre Attaingnant are played quicker than those of John Dowland. Irish music would lose its character, if it suffered a similar fate. Some present-day singers, when they learn that early musicans improvised divisions, start plastering their music with no end of silly nonsense, believing that what they do is clever, authentic, or in some way musical. As often as not, it is inappropriate, and simply makes the music worse. English lute songs (1597-1622), for example, may vary in quality, but they are carefully conceived, and do not benefit from divisions, apart maybe from just an odd note here and there. Fancy divisions obscure the words. Significantly, lute songs which survive in manuscript form rarely have divisions. Dowland had no time for what he called "simple Cantors, or vocall singers, who though they seeme excellent in their blinde Division-making, are meerely ignorant, even in the first elements of Musicke." Studying the works of Ortiz, Simpson, Dalla Casa, et al, is a valuable exercise. They present lots of ideas, lots of ways to help free you from the written page. For the lute, you could do worse than study the repeated sections of pavans and galliards by composers like Francis Cutting, John Dowland, and others. Playing divisions can be not much more than a mechanical thing, with predictable formulae or aimless meanderings. Good composers go further than this, and use divisions to create something of beauty. They can give you an idea of style. Best wishes, Stewart McCoy. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Stephen Arndt" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <lute@cs.dartmouth.edu> Sent: Friday, August 12, 2005 3:16 AM Subject: [LUTE] Belated Thanks > I would like to thank Nancy, Gary, Howard, and Sean for their responses to my inquiry about treatises on divisions. Our local university library has a number of the titles you recommended, and I shall be looking at them soon. > > I also play recorder and am currently working through Jacob van Eyck's "Der Fluyten Lusthof," which is in large part responsible for my interest in learning more about the principles involved in writing divisions. I have been practicing writing divisions for the recorder on some of my favorite tunes from "O'Neill's Music of Ireland," but some day I would like to attempt doing something similar on the lute. > > For some reason, McAfee suddenly started treating all my incoming e-mails as spam, so I didn't discover your messages until today when I went to clean out the spam folder. Thanks again for your replies! And my apologies for my belated thanks. > > Stephen Arndt To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
