Ah - I think I know what's happening - you've got the wrong end of the
stick:
I am glad you know what is happening. It all depends on which end of the
stick one has got hold of.
I'm not (and have not as far as I can see) suggesting that an
alfabeto accompaniment necessarily converts into a bass line (ie the
lowest sounding note in each chord would result in the bass line - even
if we knew it) but the converse: that a bass line enables one to
'realise' a chordal accompaniment (eg alfabeto) on the guitar - not the
same thing at all.
I'll take your word for it - there isn't time to go back all over it.
And, of course, songs with nothing other than alfabeto can't and
therefore don't show single notes. It's only when mixed tablature
becomes common that we could expect to start to
see such realisations. That's quite different to say it's 'wrong' to
consider the practice of inserting some bass notes if one has the bass
and not just the alfabeto. It's almost as if
one only saw the alfabeto dances in Calvi (1646) without noticing his
intabulated dances later in the same book and concluded he never wrote
in two parts.
He didn't write either of them actually. He copied them from elsewhere. The
alfabeto pieces are copied from Corbetta's 1639 book and the other pieces
from an unidentified source probably not originally for guitar. They
belong to two different traditions.
And I haven't even got round to Valdambrini yet - he seems to exhibit a
fine disregard for the precise octave of the bass in his cadential
examples.
But that is not relevant to earlier alfabeto accompaniments.
And, no, I don't anywhere suggest that if one has a bass line AND the
alfabeto one should always seek to amalgamate the two. But I certainly
don't think the practice is prohibited by any early contemporary
sources - hence my suggestion about the performance of the
Grandi song which has both the alfabeto and the bass line...
It is not a question of whether it is prohibited or not since we do not have
any surviving instructions. It is a question of what was customary at the
time the Grandi song appeared in print and earlier - as far as we can tell
from surviving sources which include written out alfabeto accompaniments.
These do not give any suggestion at all that any attempt was made to include
the bass part.
Monica
With reference to Lex ps "could you please stop sending the whole thread of
the discussion together
with your newest posts"? I have deleted an endless stream of junk from the
end of this message.
I suppose we are all such incurable individualists on this list that we will
never agree as to how we should reply to messages.
But I wish that people would delete everything except the points they are
responding to. Whatever may have been "netiquette" in the dim distant past
seems to me irrelevant today. Remember that these messages are archived
and if they are just a mess it is difficult to refer back to them for useful
information.
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