Dear Yair, The New Year really started off very well indeed for you, Yair. Thank you for posting the Paladino tablature book (1549) to ISMLP. But you have TWO for the price of ONE. The two tablatures that Jacques Moderne published in Lyons are bound together in that one volume from Munich. Look through it, and you'll find that it also contains the tablature of Francescho Bianchini. You should notify the IMSLP people what they (you?) have there. ISMLP needs to index the volume under Francescho Bianchini as well as Giovanni Paolo Paladino Milanois (Jean-Paul Paladin). There is a nice CD "Iean-Pavle Paladin: Tablatvre de Lvth," Eudene Ferre, luth ARCANA CD M7 875. It's out of print and I saw a copy being offered for sale for $59.99 (yes, fifty-nine).
The Bianchini tablature is dedicated to Franc,ois Gouffer, Bishop of Beziers, who ascended to the post in 1547 and died the following year. That provides us with a date ca. 1548 for the publication. It is also filled with mistakes, and that may be because anticipating his death Moderne rushed the book into print so it would be issued before he died. The bishop would give a handsome honorarium for the dedication, in effect subsidizing its publication. It's almost impossible to see the corrections on that digital reproduction, because the corrections are made by cutting out the tablature ciphers and rhythm signs, and pasting them over the mistakes. That was one of the surprises for me when I saw the actual volumes in Munich. That was a lot of work, but labor was cheap back then. The Bavarian State Library owns the only known copies of those two prints. It just demonstrates a point many miss, and that is how much lute music has been lost. Moderne probably printed at least 500, and perhaps as many as 1000 copies of each volume. All gone, except one each. 500 to one odds. Two books of sacred music for lute by a relative(?) Antoine Franc,ois Paladino Milanois were published in Lyons in 1562, but both are lost. To to see the Bianchini tablature you need to call up the Paladino one. Use the index of composers at the top. Registration is free. That's a wonderful site, and it was almost closed down when a Viennese publisher threatened a suit for copyright infringement. A number of attornys came to the rescue, since indeed most of the music posted there comes from public domain editions. The site was (afaik) started by a Canadian high school student. [1]http://imslp.org/wiki/ [2]http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Composers ajn -- References 1. mhtml:{166DD468-AEFE-46B7-9F53-8D53229DFAC8}mid://00000982/!x-usc:http://imslp.org/wiki/ 2. http://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Composers To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
