On Jun 16, 2009, at 5:42 AM, theoj89...@aol.com wrote: > Given the popularity of renaissance compositions for lute and > voice, I am surprised that I have not seen a single baroque lute > song (of course, i'm not a musicologist and may not be looking in > the right places)
You're not looking in the right places. There are a few songs with tablature in d minor tuning. The ones I'm thinking of are mostly German chorale settings. > what changed so that the baroque lute was not popularly used to > accompany voice? Nothing. What skews your observation is the change in notation. Publishers notated accompaniments in continuo instead of tablature. Basic continuo on the lute is not hard to learn, and there is considerable evidence that lute players learned it. Tablature had two commercial disadvantages. First, it made the music unattractive to keyboard players. Second, tablature in renaissance tuning made the music unattractive to lute players who strung their instruments in d minor tuning, or in one of the tunings we now call "transitional." Exhibit A in this story is Constantijn Huygens' Pathodia sacra et profana occupati, a book of songs the Dutch composer wrote with tablature accompaniments and sent to Ballard in Paris in 1646 (Willem Mook, who has studied Huygens at some length, believes his instrument was a 12-course in renaissance tuning, but the tablature parts to Pathodia sacra are lost). Ballard's editor wrote to Huygens to say that Ballard wanted all the basses to be continuo and that none of them should be in tablature, and to ask that Huygens send continuo parts, which is how the book was published in 1647. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
