On 02/03/2011 19:06, Nelson, Jocelyn wrote:
Dear Early Guitar List,
If you click the link below, you¹re on your way to my 16 minute podcast,
which includes commentary and music from my recent CD, Ma Guiterre je te
chante. A transcript of my commentary is available on the site, as well.
This was produced by ECU¹s School of Music. If you have time to listen, I
hope you enjoy it.
http://www.ecu.edu/cs-admin/mktg/treasured_tunes_jocelyn_nelson_podcast.cfm
Best wishes,
Jocelyn
I enjoyed listening to your podcast (and I do have your CD) and I hope
you will do more podcasts.
There is something I'd be very interested to follow up in your role of
four-course guitar player _and_ teacher of music history! You say that
the four-course guitar was a popular strumming instrument and I think
you imply it was a popular strumming instrument before the guitar fad of
the 16th century. This is something that intrigues me and I have raised
it in the past.
Monica and Rob and others have suggested that strumming is very old -
older than the four-course repertoire as it appears in the mid 16th
century. But there is no explicit strumming at all in the four-course
repertoire. The Braye MS has some pieces with sequences of block chords
which could be strummed - but could be plucked too. There was a fairly
recent discussion on this list about some modern transcriptions by
Giesbert of the Phalese (1570s) four-course music and it emerged that
Giesbert's extensive strumming indications were all his own invention!
It seems very natural to us, to add strumming to some of the pieces in
the four-course repertoire. And within a few decades the guitar was, for
a while, exclusively a strummed instrument.
But I wonder how far before the 1550s could we reasonably expect
guitarists to have been strumming sequences of block chords - major and
minor I, IV, Vs etc.
Surely not a hundred years earlier? My amateur understanding of 15th
century music is that most of it is in three parts (but some monophonic,
and some in more than three parts). Chord sequences simply hadn't been
invented then (?) and it would be quite anachronistic to try and impose
them on the music(?). Improvisation was based around 'tenors' - lines of
long notes with rules about acceptable and unacceptable intervals, not
on chord sequences.
Around 1500 the earliest music (published and in MS) for the lute
include block chords (doubling notes according to the practicalities of
a fingerboard in a particular tuning) but not chord sequences. The block
chords mingle with melodic lines - which predominate. So(?): no
likelihood of strumming there.
But this early lute music also includes 'grounds' - or(?) what later
came to be called grounds. I wonder if these very early 'grounds' were a
sort of half way house between the old 'tenors' - a single line, or were
actually strummable - and actually strummed - chord sequence?
Maybe you don't want to commit yourself to actual dates - but I wonder
how far back do you think guitarists (and citternists and others) could
have been strumming chord sequences? And if they were strumming
something else: what dispositions of notes could they have been strumming?
Stuart
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