Scale passages are not known as campanellas. I can sing scale
passages. I can't sing campanellas.
Campanellas are a particular kind of scale passage in which each note of the
scale is played on a different string so that the notes overlap creating a
bell like effect. In that context the displaced notes are acceptable. Of
course you can't sing them because they are an effect which can only be
created on a plucked stringed instrument.
Which is the whole point. Instruments don't have to imitate vocal music.
They can do some things which voices can't do or which wouldn't work in
vocal music.
This is surely the reason why the 1st and 2nd courses on the
theorbo were tuned down an octave - at least that is what I have
always understood. Tuning them to the upper octave was incompatible
with the string length.
Don't believe everything you read on the lute net. If reentrant
tuning were purely a matter of necessity --an inconvenience endured
for the sake of increased size (and thus volume) the theorbo wouldn't
have been popular for more than a century. Reentrant tuning might
have started as a concession to necessity, but it persisted because
of its musical advantages
What are it's musical advantages? It seems to be creating rather a
problem....Surely it would make more sense from a musical point of view to
tune the instrument straight down from treble to bass - like the violin,
harpsichord etc...
You seem to be suggesting that instrumental music was still
essentially the same as vocal music in the 17th century but surely
the whole point is that instruments have their own idioms which
reflect what they are capable of. They don't simple imitate vocal
music - even when they are accompanying it.
I hope I'm not suggesting anything other than what I said -- that the
sound picture a 17th-century theorbist or guitarist had in his head
was a 17th-century sound picture first and a theorbo or guitar sound
picture second, and would have been dominated by the vocal models of
the day.
Certainly not as far as the guitar is concerned! Singers can't strum 6/4
chords! The earliest guitar music is very unvocal.
Doesn't it strike you as odd that the only instruments in which we
have to discuss whether octaves should be displaced in melodic
passages are the instruments about which we're unsure of the
stringing? Is it more reasonable to assume that they're an island in
the musical landscape, or that we haven't figured out the stringing
questions?
I see no reason why they shouldn't have their own peculiarities. Certainly
other instruments do. Harps weren't always fully chromatic. Brass
instruments could only play the notes of the harmonic series and so on.
It would be interesting to know what sort of strings you are using to put a
high octave string on the second course of your theorbo. There are people
who argue that you should have a high octave string on the 3rd course of
guitar - and then they tell you that they use nylgut.
Monica
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