I'm assuming that the sentence in the intro to Moravian Choralbuch, here:
http://www.cittern.theaterofmusic.com/musicfiles/index.html
"The manuscript and its music may not be reproduced or published without
the consent of the Moravian Archives" refers to the music notation, not
attempts - puny amateur attempts - to play a few of these pieces.
It doesn't really look to me that the pieces are arranged in order of
difficulty. I've tried playing through them, not unfortunately on a
cittern, but on a very basic guitar (in fact a Russian guitar with the
usual very close string spacings). Perhaps, as has been suggested, these
chorales are entirely functional - for accompanying singing - and not
ever for purely instrumental performance. The fermata sign is used
extensively but when I played the pieces, pausing a bit more (perhaps
I'm misunderstanding this?), the music sounded wrong. With a singer - or
singers - long pauses would work fine - as I think happens in hymns. And
the singer or singers would know the melody and the words... over a
lifetime.
But it's a shame to have a MS of music and not actually try and play
some of it. The pieces are quite short - presumably they have many
verses? Now hymn settings with chords on every beat are fine on a
keyboard, but not so easy on a fretboard and, I think, chorale settings
like this aren't common on plucked instruments. In that respect they are
quite hard to play and sound a bit clunky. But that could be just me!
I've got four melodies. Firstly I've played them with the tuning GCEgbe.
But this is on a guitar with a string length of 65cms. In cittern terms,
that would be a big instrument? And it makes some of stretches quite
challenging. The close position, low position A minor chords sound
impressive. Andy mentioned a possible string length of 50cms so I put
on a capo at the third fret giving a string length of about 54cms.
So here are four of the chorales, first at modern GCEgbe pitch
http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No8.mp3
http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No13.mp3
http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No40.mp3
http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No43.mp3
and here, at the higher pitch
http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No8a.mp3
http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No13a.mp3
http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No40a.mp3
http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No43a.mp3
and finally a Minuet from the end of the book:
http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/Men3a.mp3
with authentic 18th century plane in the background.
Some of these chorales sound sort of familiar and I think there is a
long tradition in Germany of sturdy chorale type tunes. I may well be
misinterpreting the music and I don't mind having this pointed out! If
any offence is taken, I'll remove the files.
Stuart
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