On Mar 9, 2008, at 7:31 AM, Arthur Ness wrote: > There are > contracts with printers that indicate in the 16th century the > usual press > run for a book of lute music was about 1250-1500 copies. And > when you look around for surviving copies, how many are there? > Usually about a half dozen. More usually only a single copy > survives. Or none as with Gian Maria and Segni. In other words a > book of lute music has one chance in > a thousand of reaching us today. And the chances are smaller > with manuscripts that originally existed in one copy. THat would > make the chance of a piece in a manuscript having one chance in a > million of surviving to our age!
Can you give a rough proportion of manuscripts to printed material for lute? It sure makes you think about how popular our favorite instrument was. How big is the existing repertoire? Where did I read 100,000 works? Or was that just for the Renaissance? Would you say the only existing repertoires today that are larger are for the piano and violin? One also thinks about the fact that the lute had to be primarily an instrument of the upper and middle classes, so it must have been nearly ubiquitous among them. Ed Durbrow Saitama, Japan [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www9.plala.or.jp/edurbrow/ -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
