Dear Stewart, Thank you for your long reply.
Just a few points: > When one is faced with a piece, such as Roelikin's setting of "De > tous biens plaine", which has a range of notes from a low G to high > e" flat, one has to consider what instrument can cope. Wind > instruments cannot, because their range is too small, but the lute > is a strong contender. The low G would be played as the open 6th > course, and the high e" flat as the 8th fret on the first course. > Admittedly not all the ranges are as extreme as Roelikin's > composition, but that piece does suggest that the lute was used for > such music. Roellrin's piece is exceptional, as you justly noted, in that its raison d'être is the exploitation of the range of Guidonian hand (almost full: it goes to d'', I couldn't find a note any higher than that in Segovia; maybe in Perugia or Breslau MSS, but I'm missing one page of the former and can't find the latter; do correct me if I'm wrong). It fits the lute perfectly indeed, but wouldn't it also suit a 6-string tenor viol with Gamut as the lowest note? > In your message you refer to the problem of sustaining long notes on > the lute. I think I wanted to quote only the sentence 'I still can't quite believe this is genuinely lute music as opposed to music that is multiply realisable' in Stuart's message, obviously I selected too much. I confess, I'm rather inclined to share your point view on this than Stuart's. > I would add that much of the music under discussion is extremely > complex rhythmically. If it is to work, it has to be played > incisively, and exactly in time. I doubt whether viols (which have a > similar range to the lute) would be as successful. We all practice to achieve such and other goals, don't we? I recall hearing last year my colleagues perform several of the Perugia 1013 pieces on their bowed instruments, some with fairly complex proportions running fast over rather wide ranges, but they managed without problems. Making this music sound alive and not as a dead rhythmical exercise seems to me often more difficult than getting the notes right. > When considering what music we should play on the lute, it is worth > bearing in mind that we shouldn't restrict ourselves to music > notated in tablature. Music in staff notation is fair game too, even > if, at first sight, it doesn't look like lute music. The idea that there is a potential late medieval/early renaissance repertoire for lute in non-tablature sources has been there for quite a while now, although general awareness of it seems still too little. Therefore, the LS publication is warmly welcome as a much-needed contribution raising this awareness. The only problem with it seems to rest with words. I think it is the formulation of the title that activated a warning light in me. Maybe I'm being overly careful with words (in which case Basler education is probably to blame) but it seems to me that an average initial reaction to a title like 'Music for Lute Consort c1500' would be to take it for granted that the music contained in a publication so entitled was indeed conceived with lute ensemble in mind, and that would be showing one side of the coin only. Considering that a lot of 2-or-more-part music of the late fifteenth/early sixteenth centuries does fit both mixed groups and families of instruments (I've heard rather numerous performances to be able to say it) I think I'd prefer the title to refer to the music as i.e. 'playable on lutes'. All the best, Michal To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
