While Sanseverino tells us better not to use the guitar for plucking (in 1620, when alfabeto was the standard notation) we can suppose that he heard players doing that.
Alfabeto is a form of shorthand. You can't have a system of shorthand which everyone interprets as they wish.
Chord notation (in cifras and alfabeto) was very successful for at least half a century. It's indeed a very practical type of shorthand, but to me it seems odd to suppose that no player would ever have thought of the theoretical implications. I mean, how can you find the chords to a song if you have no idea of counterpoint and voice-leading at all. Perhaps a naive (singer-)guitarist would just have performed it thoughtlessly.
And again - in French tablature the chords are written out in full - no ambiguity. Why assume that Italian players did anything different.
Guitar music in French tablature is rather later. Chord notation in French tablature seems highly ambiguous to me, with regard to open strings. We have discussed this at length here and could not reach agreement.
> As far as the alfabeto song books are concerned the little information we have does seem to indicate that the guitar was not intended to reproduce the bass line etc. but just strummed the basic chords. It is an anachronism to do anything much more elaborate than that if what you are trying to is to re-create the ambience in which they were first performed.
I could sum up several other things that would spoil the ambience for me, like improvising far out of the box of modality, accompaniment with18th c (or 21st c...) tonal harmony, poppy syncopations etc. The result of leaving out the 5th c bourdon is not inconsistent with the general style of the time. We, as well-informed hardliners, reach different conclusions as to whether this could possibly have been done by a guitarist in the 1620s or 30s. I would prefer to take in account that an experienced theorbist-guitarist would perhaps have tried to expand the system of alfabeto from within. I don't see alfabeto as a completely rigid system, mainly for amateurs, without any relation to the developments that were going on in the sphere of basso continuo or solo music. We can assume that the guitar was used as well by singers and composers such as Falconieri, Marini, Berti and Milanuzzi, who were often trained in church music, on instruments like the organ or the lute. This is music from the latter days of the alfabeto song repertoire, when the genre was at its height. At the same time the paradigm of the guitar as an instrument of chord strumming was losing ground.
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