Dear Bruno, The best study of the Capirola Ms. is the Otto Gombosi edition published by SMA in 1955 - it's a work of truly outstanding scholarship and essential reading for those interested in the early Italian repertoire. The Federico Marincola translation of the instructions is extremely valuable too, but it's good to have Gombosi's version on hand when you read it as the different nuances of interpretation give a better understanding. I'm certainly not a linguist myself, but I understand that the major difficulty is that there was no unified Italian language at that time and the scribe Vitali wrote in the Venetian dialect - something that's a specialist subject in itself.
One of the passages in Gombosi's book reads as follows: "Upward strokes of the right hand are carefully marked by a dot underneath the corresponding numeral. Diagonal lines mark the holding of certain frets while other parts move on. Special signs indicate the beginning (w)and end (n) of tenuto passages." (Note: my use of 'w' and 'n' above is the closest approximation I can get here to the real signs as they are both semi-circular shapes. Hopefully you will recognise them in the manuscript. Vitali, the creator of the manuscript, was very careful to explain the necessity of holding the appropriate fretted notes to achieve a sustained sound - it's important to bear in mind that polyphonic lute playing was still a new idea then.) The passage continues: "A unique feature of this tablature is the use of symbols for certain ornaments and the dividing of the middle course into separately played strings. The former involves two signs: one for 'tremolo,' a trill-like alternation of main note and its upper auxiliary, the other for 'tremolo on one tone' obviously meaning an alternation of the first fret with the open string, and so on, a mordant-like effect. The first is symbolised by adding after the number of the fret of the main tone that of the auxiliary tone written above it in red dots e.g. 3; the second ornament is marked by putting two red dots above the number. For the divided mezzana course the corresponding line of the tablature is split up into two." I hope this will be helpful as a start. I suspect that the Capirola manuscript still has its undiscovered secrets. The absence of a colour facsimile is a real problem. I remember hearing Paul O'Dette say at a masterclass that the manuscript includes markings in colours that don't even show up in the monochrome facsimile. And all of the very early manuscripts have notational peculiarities that may never be fully understood. Best wishes, Denys -----Original Message----- From: lute-...@cs.dartmouth.edu [mailto:lute-...@cs.dartmouth.edu] On Behalf Of Bruno Correia Sent: 19 May 2010 23:33 To: List LUTELIST Subject: [LUTE] Capirola Does anyone understand the meaning of all the signs marked in the Capirola manuscript? I do have have it, but I don't have enough Italian to read it. The English version by Marincola is not suficient to fully understand all the signs... -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
