> ...a detailed comparison of Spinacino with originals. Dear Stuart,
Here's an easy one to start with. If you still have access to the HH Odh, look up Ha traytre amours by Johannes Stockem and compare it to Spinacino's 'Haray tre amours' (Bk II, 15v). It's mostly faithful and doesn't go all whichaway. Others definitely do like Caron's Cent mille ecus and Brumel's Mater Patris --save those for last. I get the feeling there are different intabulators involved. Other lutebooks like Newsidler and Capirola are comprised of much the same material but are more uniform in style, as are the organ intabulations by Buchner, Kleber, Hoffheimer and Paumann. What I'm getting at is that we have more evidence of the varieties in this aesthetic then just these rambles of Spinacino. I scratch my head and wonder what might have been on the missing third book. And that's not to take away from Spinacino: there are some gems in books one and two but it's often a hard lock to pick. Some pieces are unnecessarily hard since they were probably intabulated for a 5-c instrument. > > But on the face of it - and just as someone who is starting to look at > this music: there does seem a big difference between the lute music > around 1500 - which can very often seem rather unfocused and rambling > - and the very tightly-wrought music in sources like the Odhecaton. > It's like they are two different worlds, or two quite different > genres. Maybe when some instrumentalists felt that when they learned a piece they had to _really_ work it up. Maybe memorizing 1 or 2 pieces and wringing every last cadence formula they could out of them could pass for an art form too. Who knows. If they sang the pieces at the local parish on weekends I'm sure they could reverse-engineer the tab on the fly. As I see it every lute age has its Dowland, Francesco and Weiss as well its Mace, Burwell, Gaililei and Tinctoris to say a few words about it. If the words are few then I hope we can be forgiven for looking into other areas where analogies may be tentatively drawn. If the age could produce da Vinci and Ficino can we speculate on a musician approaching the same stature? Was it Pietrobono? Damn! By omen-like coincidence, this year marks the 500th anniversary of the Intabulatura de Lauto Libro primo. Sean If anyone would like a pdf of Haray tre let me know off-list. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
