Dear Chris,
Thank you so much for your posting which is very helpful for me as a
beginner. I got some tablature music for baroque guitar by Gaspar Sanz
from Rob MacKillop, stringed an old guitar with 5 strings of re-entrant
tuning (simply with guitar strings) and realized that some of the
pieces really sounded beautiful, but some quite odd with melody
lines suddenly jumping an octave up or down. So I suspected that these
were not written for re-entrant tuning, or only the upper string being
re-entrant, but to take it like this seems also not convincing either.
No idea what that means.
Warm regards
Franz
__
Von: lute-...@cs.dartmouth.edu im Auftrag von Chris Despopoulos
Gesendet: Do 03.02.2011 08:48
An: Harlan Glotzer; Monica Hall
Cc: Vihuelalist
Betreff: [VIHUELA] Re: Baroque guitar, where to start?
Well, I think that's the big issue. There's a storm of controversy
swirling around this very question, if I have followed the mailing
list
correctly.
Gaspar Sanz has hinted rather strongly (in my opinion) that he
prefers
a full re-entrant stringing. A year ago, when I started on the
instrument I went through exactly this problem. It was all the more
difficult for me because I had played many Sanz pieces on the modern
guitar -- it's downright wierd to get used to the lowest string in
the
middle of the instrument. But after heated rounds of messages, I
gave
up all thoughts of trying to selectively play the treble or bass
string
of the 4th and 5th courses (even that is controversial, and there
are
people who do this -- you must hear their results for yourself) --
for
me it's too difficult to do it convincingly. So to prove to myself,
I
recorded some Sanz pieces with fully re-entrant stringing.. The
results
are on my site ([1][1]http://cudspan.net/baroque/) and rough as they
are
they convinced me to carry on that way. I've done so with Sanz for
about a year now. In my experience there are *very few* if any Sanz
pieces that don't work. For his first fugue I find it helps to add
the
higher G on a few phrases. I'd say that's the most problematic
piece
I've encountered in his work. Indeed, with bordones on 4th and 5th
it
sounds very rich. But to my ears there are many of his pieces that
sound horrible with either of the bordones. (How jaded we
become...)
I also got the Libro de Diferentes Cifras (m/811, 1705), edited by
Francisco Alfonso Valdivia -- Monica is credited as a collaborator
(sounds subversive). I have found that very many of those pieces
also
work with fully re-entrant stringing. The campanelas in the
Paracumbres, for example, would be unthinkable to me with bordones.
On
the other hand, the second-to-last variation is redundant without
bordones. Not a problem, but questionable. The book seems to be a
catalog rather than a singular obra, so I doubt it can answer your
question.
I'm branching out to Roncalli, as the thread indicates. So far so
good, but I have to get the manuscript. So far I just have a free
PDF
that has the tablature flipped around (not sure why...). For the
Sonate en Ottavo Tuono I see no problems whatsoever with full
re-entrance... Assuming the PDF is faithful. In fact, it seems to
beg
for fully re-entrant tuning... The Preludio rings out wonderfully,
the
chords in the Alamanda and Corrente are light.
My understanding (from Sanz, anyway) is that yes, those wacky
Italians
liked full re-entrance -- at least at the time that Sanz published
his
book. I glean from the history I've read that fashion was important
and capricious, and I can only assume this was yet-another fashion.
How did it start, why, etc. are all questions I certainly can't
answer. Again, see the archives of this list, look to existing
publications... Monica is recognized in this very field.
My personal hypothesis is that the 6-string guitar would not have
developed without the benefit of bordones. Indeed, the 6-course
guitar
(double-strung) seems to have a short life in the period, and gives
way
to single courses very quickly. I beg forgiveness and correction if
I'm wrong on that. In my opinion, there's no logical reason to have
a
fully re-entrant 6-course guitar. You end up repeating a note on
one
course or the other. That hints to me that for as long as there was
5-course writing going on, re-entrance was a subcurrent that was
either
acknowledged (expressly or tacitly) or expressly denied (I think
Guerau
insisted on bordones, didn't he? And as Monica pointed out, wasn't
