Another point of re-entrant tuning that any self-respecting ukulele
player would understand, is that of chord voicing. It's notoriously
difficult to voice close intervals on the guitar... hence difficult to
directly transcribe piano music to the guitar, for example. With
re-entrant tuning that difficulty goes away. It could be that the
resulting voicings sounded better to players at the time. For me it's
a revelation... voicings that once were restricted to possibilities
inherent in open strings can now be had anywhere on the neck. Of
course, I give up a lower range... It's a very different instrument
without the bass, but no less valid or interesting.
Intuitively, I also suspect that keeping the number of courses at 5
indicates at least some tendancy to think and hear in terms of the
higher register, bordones or no. As long as you think that way, then a
6th course for the E string is strictly redundant. Only when you use
it to extend the bass range does it shed that redundancy. I'm sure
there was a period during which guitars had 5 courses but players
thought in terms of extending into the bass. Then the 6-course guitar
arrived, but as I understand it, it was short-lived and quickly
replaced with the stringing we use in the modern 6-string guitar. But
after the fact, to me the period of time devoted to 5 courses indicates
re-entrant thinking, and not the opposite. Strictly intuition, but
there it is.
cud
__________________________________________________________________
From: Stewart McCoy <lu...@tiscali.co.uk>
To: Vihuela List <vihuela@cs.dartmouth.edu>
Sent: Fri, November 19, 2010 8:16:36 AM
Subject: [VIHUELA] Valdambrini's evidence
Dear Monica,
Many thanks for your reply to my email about strumming. We agree that a
good guitarist wouldn't always feel obliged to strum every available
string of a chord all the time. We also agree that guitarists had long
been happy with the "wrong" inversion of a chord - in particular,
second
inversions.
Where we differ, I think, is whether someone strumming a guitar with
bourdons may have chosen to avoid some of the lower notes of a chord,
where they would otherwise interfere with a bass line, like the bass
notes played on a spinet for that song by Stefano Landi.
To this I would ask, why is that guitarists in the 17th century chose
to
string their guitars without bourdons? By doing that, they drastically
reduce the overall range of the instrument, and different courses end
up
duplicating each other by sounding notes at the same pitch. It seems a
very strange thing to want to do, yet so many guitarists chose to
string
their guitars that way. Having a re-entrant tuning enables one to play
lots of fancy campanellas, of course, but I suspect that this was not
why the bourdons were removed in the first place.
My guess, (and it would be lovely if you could confirm it to be right),
is that the bourdons were removed for the sake of strumming. Second
inversions were not such a problem per se, especially if there was
another instrument supplying the true bass, but a second inversion
involving a "wrong" note sounding below the bass, or one which was
particularly low in pitch, was not satisfactory.
Assuming that to be the case, the guitarist has two ways of avoiding
those low, unwanted notes. Either he avoids playing them, as Lex has
maintained was a possibility, or he gets rid of the bourdons
altogether,
so that he can strum to his heart's content without having to worry
about having to miss out the odd unfelicitous low note.
Best wishes,
Stewart.
-----Original Message-----
From: [1]lute-...@cs.dartmouth.edu
[mailto:[2]lute-...@cs.dartmouth.edu] On
Behalf Of Monica Hall
Sent: 19 November 2010 12:18
To: Stewart McCoy
Cc: Vihuelalist
Subject: [VIHUELA] Re: Valdambrini's evidence
> Triads were not new in the 17th century. They had certainly been
around
> a lot earlier than that, and were pretty well established by the 15th
> century. Composers like Dufay made much use of them. You have only to
> look at 15th-century pieces played on the lute with a plectrum to see
> how a polyphonic texture was filled out here and there with triadic
> chords.
I think you are taking everything I have said literally and out of
context.
There is a
difference between consonances made up of the notes of a triad and a
recognization of the relationship between them. It is not that these
things
are "new" in the sense that no-one had ever thought them before.
Rather
there is a shift of emphasis with the emmergence of the seconda
prattica.
It is obvious in the 4-course repertoire that there are the same chords
which are found in the 5-course repertoire but without the fifth course
and
these may have been strummed. These are on the margins so to speak.
> As far as strumming on the guitar is concerned, the actual notes
played
> cannot always be notated accurately, because a skilled strummer will
not
> strike all the strings of a chord every time. He may, for example,
> choose to strike all the strings for a strong down-stroke, but catch
> just the first few strings with a lighter strum on the up-stroke.
I have no problem at all with the idea that there would be different
strumming patterns to create a contrast in texture but I do not agree
with
you or Lex that ensuring that the chords were in the correct inversions
was
an issue. It is an entirely modern obsession.
Monica
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