On Dec 2, 2011, at 7:58 AM, Martyn Hodgson wrote: > As David Hill points out (have you bothered > to read his paper?) the voice generally expected when the songs were > composed was soprano/tenor. As he says, the male alto, to take David > Van Oijan's personal preference, was certainly around but in England > "was not deployed as a solo voice outside of a cathedral, collegiate or > courtly chapel......."
You've been bandying about two issues here, and I think you've confused them. First, is it anachronistic to transpose lute songs (and the subsidiary question about whether David van Ooijen is some kind of freak because he transposes tablature accompaniments without writing out the transposition)? Second, is it anachronistic, in a renaissance-faire sort of way, for male altos to sing lute songs? Your answer yes to both questions, and indeed cite the second answer as dispositive of the first question. I see several fundamental flaws in your conclusion. First, male altos' range considerations are no different from those of female altos or baritones or basses. So male altos are relevant to the question of transposing lute songs only in that they would add numbers to the class of singers who would need to transpose a song published in the soprano/tenor range, which would indicate that more than half the available singers might need to transpose at least some of the songs if they wanted to sing the top line. The class of transposers might actually have been considerably more than half: the songs were written for home use, largely by amateur singers, which might mean that a larger percentage of the singers would have had lower voices -- amateurs tend to sing lower because they tend to use the same register singing as they do speaking, but let's put that aside for now. The point is that male alto or no male alto, many singers would have needed to transpose their favorite lute song. Second, the idea that male altos weren't "deployed as a solo voice outside of a cathedral, collegiate or courtly chapel" is irrelevant to the question of whether they sang lute songs. Again, these songs were published so that amateurs could sing them in their homes. The singers were not "deployed." They did what they did. Male altos sang in English choirs. Do you think they were completely silent when they walked out of the church? NEVER sang when they got home? If you don't think that, what do you suppose a male alto would have sung at home in 1608, particularly if he had a lute in E? Do you think no male alto EVER sang a lute song that way? (Note to Martyn: before answering, look up "rhetorical question") Third, your whole paradigm is inapplicable, because it assumes that there is some sort of verifiable performance practice for lute songs. There can be performance practice only where there is performance. We're not talking about the deployment of theorbos in Venetian polychoral motets in 1603 or countertenors in Handel's operas in 1729, where you can expect that there was a regular practice. Lute songs weren't written to be performed. We're talking about what people did in their homes, adapting the songs to their own circumstances. Fourth, I note that during this thread you've asked David what "evidence" he had that lutenists historically might have transposed tablature, and what "evidence" he had that male altos sang lute songs. Asking that question is sometimes an exercise in critical thinking and intellectual rigor, and sometimes an exercise in silliness. If you demand evidence in a situation where there's no reason to expect it, you're like the anti-Stratfordians who cite, as evidence that William Shakespeare could not have written Shakespeare's plays, the "fact" that he owned no books, which they infer from the absence of evidence that he owned any. They could, on the same evidence, infer that he owned no shoes. Let's assume there's no evidence for sight-transposition of tablature or male altos singing lute songs. So what? If I comb payroll records, or contemporary accounts, or written programs or playbills, and find lots of details about singers in London in 1729 but no evidence of countertenors, I can rationally infer that there were none, because I'd expect to find evidence if there were. But I can't rationally expect to find much evidence of transposition on sight, because by definition it doesn't leave written evidence. I can't comb payroll records or playbills to find out whether countertenors sang lute songs in their homes, and it's sheer luck if there's a contemporary account that bears on the subject. The absence of evidence is meaningless. Before you ask whether there's evidence, you need to think about whether it's a relevant question or just a silly one. A final thought, then I need to get back to earning a living: If David van Ooijen can transpose tablature, do you think Dowland couldn't? -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
