Bravo!
I agree about the order of difficulty business. That came from
somebody's doctoral thesis that briefly mentioned this MS...
andy r
On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 1:55 PM, Stuart Walsh [1]s.wa...@ntlworld.com
wrote:
I'm assuming that the sentence in the intro to Moravian Choralbuch,
here:
[2]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
[3]http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No8.mp3
[4]http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No13.mp3
[5]http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No40.mp3
[6]http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No43.mp3
and here, at the higher pitch
[7]http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No8a.mp3
[8]http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No13a.mp3
[9]http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No40a.mp3
[10]http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No43a.mp3
and finally a Minuet from the end of the book:
[11]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
To get on or off this list see list information at
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--
References
1. mailto:s.wa...@ntlworld.com
2. http://www.cittern.theaterofmusic.com/musicfiles/index.html
3. http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No8.mp3
4. http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No13.mp3
5. http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No40.mp3
6. http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No43.mp3
7. http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No8a.mp3
8. http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No13a.mp3
9. http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No40a.mp3
10. http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No43a.mp3
11. http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/Men3a.mp3
12. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/%7Ewbc/lute-admin/index.html
