Sandy Hackney wrote: > In Kapsberger's "Libro Primo d'Intavolatura di Chitarone" (1604) there > is a Toccata Arpeggiata
Indeed there is. I remember Greg Hamilton playing this piece for a concert of lute people (it was in conjunction with an LSA seminar) and getting laughs when he referred to this a famous theorbo piece, or the closest thing there is to one. > that provides only the chords. Was there a "standard" arpeggio > pattern to be used or was it up to the performer? If so what do > lutenists out there prefer? Kapsberger gives an arpeggiation/finger pattern at the beginning of the book, the gist of which is that you play thumb-index-middle-index regardless of whether the last note is on the top of the chord or the middle. What he doesn't say is whether you play it all in rhythm, with 16 16th-notes to the bar (which is the way it's almost always played), or as a series of rolled chords. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
