On Nov 29, 2007, at 7:00 AM, Wayne Cripps wrote: > I would think that in the old times, a lutenist would mostly play > music from his or her time. They obviously would not play > anything from their future, but I am sure they were mostly > not too interested in music of the past, except perhaps for > a few master works. I doubt that lutenists were into "early music" > the way we are.
Not the way we are, but "the past" has a way of intruding on the present. The tendency to cling to the music of your youth was probably just as strong for them as it is for us, and by the time you account for generational overlap -- for example, an older teacher using music of his youth to teach a young pupil -- you find music, and musical styles, hanging on for a few generations. The Marsh Lute Book (c. 1600) has modern pieces by Dowland and Holborne cheek by jowl with pieces by Francesco da Milano (1497-1543) and Albert de Rippe (c. 1480-1551), and intabulations of music by Verdelot (c. 1480-1530), Taverner (d. 1545) and Claudin de Sermisy (1490-1562). So a lutenist in the 17th century would play music written by composers born in the 15th century. Put less dramatically, some music was played for 70 or 80 years. Marsh doesn't seem to be an aberration. Piccinini's 1623 and 1639 books have both Mannerist baroque toccatas (the cutting edge at the time) and renaissance polyphonic fantasies of the sort he played, and might have written, when he was growing up in the 1570's. Monteverdi's 1641 Selva Morale has mass sections in the latest baroque style alongside mass sections in the style of Palestrina, who died in 1594 when Monteverdi was 27. Zarlino, who was four years old when Josquin died in 1521, was still using Josquin's music as examples in the 1580's. Heinrich Schutz, who died in 1672, studied with Giovanni Gabrieli, who was born around 1555. Wayne's basic point is more or less valid. Elizabethan lutenists may have played Francesco da Milano's music, but probably didn't know or care how Francesco himself had played it, and wouldn't have thought for a moment about changing techniques or instruments to do it. HP -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
