Dear Ron, I'd like to thank you, in turn, for your thoughtful reply. If I take issue with one or two points, it is nothing personal - I'm just thinking out loud. 1. How can you say that you 'can state this without reservation' that 'everyone in the sixteenth century who was fortunate enough to lay hands on a lute was first taught to sing'? Everyone? But I'm being picky. You probably mean 'most people'? Impossible to know for sure.
2. The important part of your useful Zarlino quotation, for me at least, was 'progressions absolutely intolerable in composition'. This clearly divides the matter into two seemingly polar camps: Performance Practice and Compositional Practice. I guess Zarlino was a composer?! 3. Your phrase, 'Personally, I think this fantasia has its own calm, quiet integrity and really does not need finger ornaments to tart it up.' I find interesting. I have never saught to 'tart up' a composition by using ornaments. Nothing could be further from my mind. The term 'finger ornaments' is also interesting. 4. I'm not sure of your contention that a 'full, round, warm tone' would a) cloud the polyphony, and b) is not possible (your implication?) on a lute. Anyway, your stance is a common one today, and might well have been common in the 16thC, which is not to denigrate it in any way. I played Fuenllana fantasias without decoration because they just didn't seem to move me to do so. So I am not contra anything you say, but I do feel that the relationship between ornamentation and phrasing is one that is little discussed, either historically or today, possibly because it is difficult to put into words. Coming from a different angle...I spent some time in Istanbul studying with the State Orchestra - traditional Turkish classical music, one might say. Everyone had the same score, treble clef, but they all decorated it in their own way. 20 people doing the same thing differently. And it worked beautifully, although it took me over a month to really start appreciating it. There is also the belief by many scholars that larger-scale part music, ten-part masses, for instance, were a product of the tradition of vocal improvising. The style still exisits in some west coast islands in Scotland, and elsewhere in the world. Some might say it sounds cacophanous, some say it sounds beautiful. I tried it with ten of my students: I got them to sing the first line of the Lord's Prayer starting on a C and finding their way to a G. After a few terrible attempts, they started listening to each other, and it started to sound very convincing. The point is, singers DID improvise in the 16thC, and there is a long tradition before and after that century of improvising florid lines, away from the written score. I'm just wondering out loud if we shouldn't do something similar? Rob -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
