Monica Hall wrote:
Many thanks to Rob - who has valiantly made the changes and made it
available again. It has had a few ups and downs.
The bit about the Italian manuscript F:Pn.Res.Vmc ms. 59, fol. 108v
is at
the end of the section on Italy although it doesn't appear in the list on
the Front Page.
Any comments and corrections are always welcome. I update it as the
opportunity arises.
Monica
This is an extremely valuable source. Many thanks for making it
available. I have looked at these pages before and I have just been
looking at them again today.
I suspect many of us got what we know about Baroque guitar stringing
mainly through the work of James Tyler. Here we have much of the
evidence to make up our own minds. Or rather, it doesn't look like the
evidence is strong enough to make up our minds about very much!
Monica, would it be pernickety to suggest that what you call the
'conventional tuning' has three possibilities. The Ribayez extract says
that the bourdons were usually placed on the treble side of the course -
implying of course, that they could have been the other way - the
'usual' way (i.e.as on lutes..and vihuelas?). So for the fifth 'course'
:- aA, Aa ....AA as a third possibility as suggested by Sanz (for
'noisy' music)? (and ditto fourth course)
I think the implicit conclusion that you are drawing from all this is
simply: stringing varied a lot. But would it be possible to sum up what
positive evidence there is, perhaps in the form of a table. For example,
for Sanz, at least at the time he wrote the extract you translate, he
would definitely prefer a re-entrant tuning. And you could have a
distinction between 'explicitly stated' and 'implied'. Sanz seems pretty
explicit whereas Guerau's instructions definitely imply a 'conventional'
tuning.
But perhaps you'd rather let your readers do the work.
Stuart
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