On Sep 29, 2007, at 11:18 AM, T. Diehl-Peshkur wrote: > (by the way, I am a harpsichordist by training, not really a > lutenist- yet, > so if my thinking is skewed, just say so.)
I'm not qualified to comment on your thinking (ten years of marriage to a harpsichordist inclines to me suspect skewed thinking , and my page numbers don't jibe with yours, but the same questions have occurred to me about at least one Weiss piece, a Chaconne in A, as I recall. All your hypotheses are reasonable (although the last one doesn't work without including one of the others). Another possibility, of course, is that composers sometimes use their resources in ways that strike us mere mortals as illogical or impractical. If you want to play it on an 11-course and drop the B, or on a 13- course and add some low A's, you probably won't get struck by lightning. > I got puzzled by the Sonata 12 in A major (starting on page 51v) where > everything is clearly for 11 course lute, going down only > to the 11th course with a (4) below staff...Except for ONE note in ONE > movement, the Menuet on page 54r, measure 15 which uses one single > note on course 12 (5) for B. I find this utterly strange, but maybe > I am > missing something here. > > Why is this strange to me? Well, if we assume the one note on the 12th > course was on a 13 course lute, then why did Weiss avoid using the > low A of the 13th course for a piece written in A Major? It seems > rather > unnatural, even peculiar to me. Indeed, it is not in keeping > with they way he uses low notes in other pieces. In addition, the > other > Sonata in A Major No. 16, within volume 1 of the London Manuscript > on the other hand makes full use of the 13th course A everywhere... > In my mind, only four reasons are possible for this =8Clone note' > as far as I > can judge: > -Was this Sonata meant for a 12 course lute, so there was no low A > available, just a B which was used just once? > -is this perhaps an example of one of his first pieces written for > the 13 > course lute and he (or his pupil ?) were getting used to it? > -A mistake or addition? > -The piece originally belonged to another suite and was copied here > inadvertently without regard to the =8C13 course nature' > of the other pieces in (Volume 1 anyway) of the London manuscript? > (The ms > is not chronological as Time Crawford and others have already > clearly noted, so could this be an earlier piece to begin with?) -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
