[BAROQUE-LUTE] Re: continuo playing in Germany

[howard posner]

On Apr 17, 2008, at 11:05 AM, Rob MacKillop wrote:

>
Re the German Lute Society's "Fundamenta der Lauten-Musique und  
Zugleich der Composition," Rob wrote:

> Is there any possibility that this will be translated into English?

It comes with an English booklet.  Here are some excerpts of a review  
I wrote in the LSA Quarterly a while ago:

The manuscript, housed in recent years in the Prague University  
Library and the Lobkovicz family library in Rudnice, has been  
considered a significant source of information about playing continuo  
on the d-minor-tuned baroque lute.  But it's at once both more and  
less than that.  For modern readers, it's a different way of looking  
at music.  Most of us learn continuo, if at all, as a sort of  
addendum to technique and theory, part of our understanding of how  
the key system works.  The Fundamenta shows a musical culture in  
which continuo was an organic, integral part, even though musicians  
still thought modally.
*               *               *
The book begins with the very basics -- the lute's strings, the notes  
of the scale -- and proceeds into harmony, a bit of counterpoint, and  
a few elements of composition.  Along the way it explains and gives  
examples of harmonic progressions and continuo notation, including  
such fine points as how to elaborate the treble line to avoid (or  
disguise) parallel fifths and octaves.  It explains preparation and  
resolution of dissonances, and how specific chords come about and  
where they lead.  It gives capsule descriptions of musical forms  
(overture, slow and quick allemandes, courante, air, bourree,  
rigaudon, gavotte, minuet, sarabande, rondeau, canarie, passepied,  
gigue, march) and then offers preludes to demonstrate how to play in  
the usable keys.  It ends, a bit anticlimactically, with  
illustrations of the eight clefs a musician was likely to encounter.

All musical examples are given in on two parallel staves, one in  
continuo notation (bass clef with figures) and the other in  
tablature.  The result is a good look at what continuo notation meant  
to the author, and it's often surprising.  The book is downright  
capricious about the octave in which the bass part sounds.  Where the  
continuo part goes from second-space C to second-line B and back, the  
tablature part takes the C's down an octave on the lowest (11th)  
course, so the line jumps a ninth twice instead of going up and down  
a semitone.  This, like many such instances, maximizes use of open  
strings, but elsewhere the line is just as capriciously taken up an  
octave.  There is a similarly free attitude about whether to play  
reiterated bass notes.

A major surprise is the variety and complexity of the realized  
parts.  Above the continuo line, the tablature shows arpeggiations,  
melodic elaborations, and moments of free fantasy.  There is little  
explanation in the text of what this all means.  The author may have  
been offering a manual for improvisation, giving the continuo line as  
a harmonic framework.  Or he may have been suggesting a free and  
creative approach to playing continuo.

*               *               *
The text is spare, even cryptic, as if the author were being charged  
by the word.  If I understand the editors correctly, the original is  
mostly in Latin, with a few Germanisms and an occasional German  
passage.  The main volume has the original text and a parallel column  
with Mathias R=F6sel's German translation and editorial notes.  An  
English translation of the Latin (also by R=F6sel) is in a separate  
booklet, which has marginal references to the page in the main volume  
but no tablature or staff illustrations, so the English reader must  
toggle back and forth between books.  The editors try to make the  
task easier with marginal notes keying the English text to two sets  
of page numbers: those of the main volume and those of the original  
manuscript folios (which are printed in the main volume's text).   
This feature would be more of a convenience if the cross-references  
were always correct, which they aren't.  The English version lacks,  
for the most part, the German version's explanatory notes.  It  
suffers from occasional awkwardness of the sort that could have been  
avoided by having a native English speaker read it before publication  
("Some of the abbreviations could not be dissolved because of bad  
legibility."  "After all these rules have been aforesaid now follows  
their execution.").  Other passages can be sticky because the  
linguistic concepts are strange ("concert becomes pleasant according  
to fantasy"), and R=F6sel apparently wants to avoid imposing his own  
views on the text.  The bottom line is that this is a German book,  
not an English one, and it shows.



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