Well....
There is some doubt as to whether it would have been practical to put a high
octave string on the 3rd course - tuned a minor 3rd above the 1st - with the
kind of gut strings available in the 17th century.
And without doing a detailed analysis - I guess you could make an equally
strong case for octave stringing on the 4th and 5th courses in this piece.
Indeed someone has done in the past.
I would say that whichever method of stringing you use there are
idiocyncracies of one sort or another which it is impossible to resolve.
That is the attraction of the instrument.
I have just been reading Ed Durbrow's interview with Ray Nurse in LSA
quarterly and I particularly liked the bit where he say
"Their performance situation was different (from ours) they ate different
food and smelled worse than we do, they burnt heretics and believed that the
earth was the centre of the universe!" (and a lot of other things that
seem totally illogical to us today judging by the programmes on the
"Medieval Mind" currently showing on BBC4 over here.
Their world was certainly different from ours and they had fewer choices
than we have.
But don't let my philosophizing deter you from playing the music with any
method of stringing you fancy. We can only play the music in a way that
makes sense to us today.
Monica
----- Original Message -----
From: "Rob MacKillop" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Vihuela" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2008 8:19 PM
Subject: [VIHUELA] Sanz and the High G
Here are two versions of Gaspar Sanz's Fuga 1:
a) no bourdons and unison third course:
http://www.songoftherose.co.uk/mp3/bg/sanz/RobMacKillopSanzFuga1.mp3
b) no bourdons and high octave third course - the highest octave on the
thumb side: http://www.rmguitar.info/mp3s/Rfuga.mp3 (on an original
instrument, mid-17thC)
Now, Sanz stipulates (Cf http://www.monicahall.co.uk/) bourdons for
strummed
music and no bourdons for plucked music. Nowhere does he say 'use a high
octave pairing on the third course'. We've had a few debates on this list
about bourdons and high ocatves, and I've always accepted that Sanz should
be played with unison third course and no bourdons, but this fuga makes me
wonder. In the vast majority of Sanz's music we meet moments where lines
leap about in octaves, and it never bothers me - I quite like it, in fact;
it seems to be part of the charm of the instrument. However, when it comes
to this fuga...almost every line makes musical sense, EVERY line, with the
high octave on the third, but not so with unison third: this really
stretches the bounds of musicality, not just to our own aestehtics, but to
what was around Sanz at the time.
Someone like Sanz would have had many different guitars - different
stringing arrangements, different construction, even different pitches. Is
it not reasonable to suggest that one of these guitars might have had a
high
g, but the guitar he used most for punteado style had a unison g? This
fuga
sits perfectly on a guitar with a high octave third course.
Cue Monica...
Rob
PS Monica - I agree with everything you say on the subject of stringing,
but
this particular piece...
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