I'm sorry you find Bob Spencer's paper so very poor.
My point about the tablatures (rather than staff notation) is that it
is with these that we find an unequivocal indication of the tuning
required for a particular named instrument. I'm not aware of any
tablature sources which require, for example, a re-entrant tuning for
an archlute (or various cognates). Do you?
MH
__________________________________________________________________
From: R. Mattes <r...@mh-freiburg.de>
To: David Tayler <vidan...@sbcglobal.net>; lute
<lute@cs.dartmouth.edu>; Martyn Hodgson <hodgsonmar...@yahoo.co.uk>
Sent: Tuesday, 28 January 2014, 16:57
Subject: Re: [LUTE] Re: archlute/theorbo in Corelli's Op. 1
On Tue, 28 Jan 2014 11:35:20 +0000 (GMT), Martyn Hodgson wrote
> Have a look at:
This is either a non-answer (how utterly Zen) or pretty close to an
(ad hominem) insult.
> a) the early sources (Bob Spencer's famous paper still represents a
good
summary [1]http://www.vanedwards.co.uk/spencer/html/index.html );
Do you really imply that I haven't read this article? This article was
valuable at it's time but of course shows also the goals of historical
organology at that time, i.e. to classify and to create a (hopefully)
one-to-one mapping between terminology and morphology of instruments.
But, o.k., since you threw it in: just out of curiosity, did you
recently read that article? Let's start with page 408:
"Defining the differences between the chitarrone, theorbo and archlute
has always been difficult. Mersenne (1637) was confused, and few
readers of his book on instruments seem to have noticed that he
renamed his theorbe, arciliuto."
And, shortly after that on the same page, about the chitarrone:
"Note that he says nothing about long un-stopped bass strings, which
Piccinini says he invented for the arciliuto in 1594. I suggest that
before 1594 the chitarrone may have been exactly what Piccinini says:
bass lutes restrung at higher pitch with the top two courses lowered
an octave, but without very long contrabassi."
So, here we see that in the early 17 century, features 1 & 2 seem to
define a chitarrone (later to be called tiorba). Presence of feature 4
defines the archlute. As we already see, these feature sets are
disjunct, so an instrument with all three features might be given both
names, depending on who refered to it and where. This is not at all
problematic (at least for the speaker back then) as long as no
conflict arises. So, in France in the mid of the 17th century a
long-necked lute in vielle tone was called theorbe, the short-necked
instrument being called lute. Only when instruments in the "new"
(read: reentrant) tuning became more prominent (because of the italian
players? Bartolotti?) there was a need for terminological adaptions.
Reading Spencer's comments on Praetorius: the "Testudo Theorbata"
(pressumably a "liuto attiorbato", an instrument Piccinini prefers to
call "archiliuto") might easily be called a "theorba" by a german
speaker ...
>
> b) tablatures identified for the two instruments and the tuning
required
>
So why don't you comment on the tow tablature examples I explicitly
mentioned?
Also: by looking at tablatures we might be looking at the wrong
sources. Most
of the music pulished explicitly for tiorba is published in common
music notation,
_not_ in tablature (maybe because there was no common tuning/pitch
level a
publisher
could expect. For this see also the story of the Huygens music print).
Regarding the qualtiy of the Spencer article: read the Weiss letter and
read
Spencer's
interpretation. I also think that he fell into the old "Germany" trapp:
you
just can't
talk about theorbo in "Germany". You need to at least distingush
between the
austrian
parts (where the theorbo most likely was introduced early on by the
italian
musicians
in the royal chapel and not "... from France, along with the French
lute.").
Cheers, Ralf Mattes
> MH
>
--
References
1. http://www.vanedwards.co.uk/spencer/html/index.html
To get on or off this list see list information at
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
