On Apr 17, 2008, at 11:05 AM, Rob MacKillop wrote:
>
Re the German Lute Society's "Fundamenta der Lauten-Musique und
Zugleich der Composition," Rob wrote:
> Is there any possibility that this will be translated into English?
It comes with an English booklet. Here are some excerpts of a review
I wrote in the LSA Quarterly a while ago:
The manuscript, housed in recent years in the Prague University
Library and the Lobkovicz family library in Rudnice, has been
considered a significant source of information about playing continuo
on the d-minor-tuned baroque lute. But it's at once both more and
less than that. For modern readers, it's a different way of looking
at music. Most of us learn continuo, if at all, as a sort of
addendum to technique and theory, part of our understanding of how
the key system works. The Fundamenta shows a musical culture in
which continuo was an organic, integral part, even though musicians
still thought modally.
* * *
The book begins with the very basics -- the lute's strings, the notes
of the scale -- and proceeds into harmony, a bit of counterpoint, and
a few elements of composition. Along the way it explains and gives
examples of harmonic progressions and continuo notation, including
such fine points as how to elaborate the treble line to avoid (or
disguise) parallel fifths and octaves. It explains preparation and
resolution of dissonances, and how specific chords come about and
where they lead. It gives capsule descriptions of musical forms
(overture, slow and quick allemandes, courante, air, bourree,
rigaudon, gavotte, minuet, sarabande, rondeau, canarie, passepied,
gigue, march) and then offers preludes to demonstrate how to play in
the usable keys. It ends, a bit anticlimactically, with
illustrations of the eight clefs a musician was likely to encounter.
All musical examples are given in on two parallel staves, one in
continuo notation (bass clef with figures) and the other in
tablature. The result is a good look at what continuo notation meant
to the author, and it's often surprising. The book is downright
capricious about the octave in which the bass part sounds. Where the
continuo part goes from second-space C to second-line B and back, the
tablature part takes the C's down an octave on the lowest (11th)
course, so the line jumps a ninth twice instead of going up and down
a semitone. This, like many such instances, maximizes use of open
strings, but elsewhere the line is just as capriciously taken up an
octave. There is a similarly free attitude about whether to play
reiterated bass notes.
A major surprise is the variety and complexity of the realized
parts. Above the continuo line, the tablature shows arpeggiations,
melodic elaborations, and moments of free fantasy. There is little
explanation in the text of what this all means. The author may have
been offering a manual for improvisation, giving the continuo line as
a harmonic framework. Or he may have been suggesting a free and
creative approach to playing continuo.
* * *
The text is spare, even cryptic, as if the author were being charged
by the word. If I understand the editors correctly, the original is
mostly in Latin, with a few Germanisms and an occasional German
passage. The main volume has the original text and a parallel column
with Mathias R=F6sel's German translation and editorial notes. An
English translation of the Latin (also by R=F6sel) is in a separate
booklet, which has marginal references to the page in the main volume
but no tablature or staff illustrations, so the English reader must
toggle back and forth between books. The editors try to make the
task easier with marginal notes keying the English text to two sets
of page numbers: those of the main volume and those of the original
manuscript folios (which are printed in the main volume's text).
This feature would be more of a convenience if the cross-references
were always correct, which they aren't. The English version lacks,
for the most part, the German version's explanatory notes. It
suffers from occasional awkwardness of the sort that could have been
avoided by having a native English speaker read it before publication
("Some of the abbreviations could not be dissolved because of bad
legibility." "After all these rules have been aforesaid now follows
their execution."). Other passages can be sticky because the
linguistic concepts are strange ("concert becomes pleasant according
to fantasy"), and R=F6sel apparently wants to avoid imposing his own
views on the text. The bottom line is that this is a German book,
not an English one, and it shows.
--
To get on or off this list see list information at
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
