Dear Howard, Who were "they"?
Absolute strict time was certainly unknown to them (musicians), we take this idea for granted nowadays because of the mechanical age we live in. Absolute precision is our game not theirs... If "they" were dancers, they probably valued musicians who kept strict time. Sure, when playing together we must be together. The example given is of a solo performance by Mr. North. Solo music by nature allows us to be freer in time. I imagine a group of amateurs playing or singing multi-part music would keep fairly strict time just in the interest of staying together, unless there were good reason (in the words, for example) to alter the tactus. Exactly, not just amateurs but professional too. These were musical activities far more important than solo lute music, and lute players participated in them. Well, by the sheer number of 16th century solo publications for lute, I wouldn't be so sure of such statement. Nobody spent the bulk of their musical time practicing solo lute music, which is something we can easily forget if solo music is the biggest part of our own musical efforts. Oh yes, who is nobody? Amateurs or professionals? Well, the duties of a professional included to compose, arrange, teach, play solos, acompany singers, play continuo and much more. But did the amateurs have the same duties? Maybe playing solos was indeed very common, and people spent a good deal of time on it. It seems that Lully paid a high price trying to keep musicians playing in absolute strict time... 2013/4/9 howard posner <[1]howardpos...@ca.rr.com> On Apr 8, 2013, at 7:26 PM, Bruno Correia <[2]bruno.l...@gmail.com> wrote: > How absolute metric time could have been acheived in the Renaissance? > The tactus was a constant pulse behind the rhythm, but it was an > organic motion not a strict measured time like a metronome. > Actually, the only genre of music (which comes to my mind) that really > plays in time is pop music... How do we know they valued absolute > strict time in the Renaissance? Who were "they"? If "they" were dancers, they probably valued musicians who kept strict time. I imagine a group of amateurs playing or singing multi-part music would keep fairly strict time just in the interest of staying together, unless there were good reason (in the words, for example) to alter the tactus. These were musical activities far more important than solo lute music, and lute players participated in them. Nobody spent the bulk of their musical time practicing solo lute music, which is something we can easily forget if solo music is the biggest part of our own musical efforts. I don't mean to suggest that you should set your metronome at the beginning of a polyphonic fantasy and stick doggedly with it. I think that variation in tempo would have been part of an approach that relied heavily on understanding music in the rhetorical terms that were part of an educated person's vocabulary. You might, for example, vary the tempo if you perceive a phrase as an anadiplosis or an anaphora, and two players might have differing views about such things. So there might not actually have been a "they." Is there any reason to think there weren't just as many views about how to play something as there are now? This was, after all, an age utterly without the homogenizing influence of recordings and radio. -- To get on or off this list see list information at [3]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html -- Bruno Correia Pesquisador autonomo da pratica e interpretac,ao historicamente informada no alaude e teorba. Doutor em Praticas Interpretativas pela Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. -- References 1. mailto:howardpos...@ca.rr.com 2. mailto:bruno.l...@gmail.com 3. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html