Thank you nfor these precisions. I take note with satisfaction that you also
credit Vieux Gaultier with
around 50 pieces in old tuning, which is not nothing !
For the rest, I have also been playing and studying French music in a lot of
different sources and all tunings
worldwide for over 30 years too, and I notice that the Gaultier pieces are
mostly present in manuscripts
compiled after his death on December 17th 1651, an anniversay for next week ;-)
!
Another thing that troubles me is the fact that the most widely spread version
of Tombeau de Mésangeau,
in d minor, seems very late (in style) compared with the year when Mésangeau
actually died... And almost
nobody so farhas made any mention of the very beautiful Tombeau de Mésangeau in
flat tuning which appears
in Rés. 6211 (f° 31v-32) in a different handwriting from the first part of the
manuscript which includes
a good number of pieces attributed to Vieux Gaultier, but in d minor.
Different handwriting, different period ? The second part of the manuscript
looks definitely older to me and
I would think its repertoire is older too, more related to the period following
Mesangeau's death in 1638.
Moreover, Mesangeau is usually supposed to have been Gaultier's teacher at a
time, hence his Tombeau
as a tribute to the master. But Mésangeau did not write in D minor, only vieil
ton and accords nouveaux,
and yet the tuning was around before 1638 when Bouvier's pieces in both sharp
tuning and d minor appear in
Ballard's anthology.
Then, Gaultier went back to Dauphiné as early as 1642 (when the Queen mother
died) and is not known
to have kept contacts with the lutenists in Paris who established the use of
the new "accord ordinaire".
The only contact we are told of is with Lenclos who is not known to have
written anything in the d minor tuning.
Moreover, Gaultier's reluctance to play ("pour moy, j'ay quitté tretoute cette
vilainie. - Je n'en joüerois pas pour
tous les biens du monde,") for finally accepting to play with his old friend
for what Tallemant (not always a reliable witness)
says to be 36 hours in a row. I doubt very much he did not continue to play the
instrument he had been taught to play
from a very early age (since the 1580s) and with which he had become famous at
court and elsewhere...
Far from me the desire to deprive Gaultier from his wonderful pieces in d
minor, which I love and play, but I simply want
to question the traditional presentation of Gaultier as a rather monolithic
monument of the baroque tuning, which for me
he is not ! I think his contribution was much more complex and deep than it
actually appears...
Best wishes,
Jean-Marie Poirier
--------------
> Â
>
> It seems you have misunderstood me, or that I haven't expressed myself
> clearly enough.
>
> Â
>
> I perfectly know that there are more than 50 pieces credited to
> "Gaultier" (variously spelt), which appear in printed and mostly
> manuscript sources since 1610 and that, in spite of the absence of
> first name, all or almost all of them may be credited to Ennemond
> without hesitation.
>
> Â
>
> I only said that I can claim to have examined in detail over the last
> thirty years most, if not all 17th-century sources containing French
> music in whatever tuning, and that I have always been struck by the
> fact that there were very few pieces had versions in both vieil ton and
> accords nouveaux, or in both accords nouveaux and d-minor tuning. It
> looks as if lutenists had generally preferred to compose new music
> directly in the newer tuning(s) rather than to adapt music in an
> earlier tuning to a newer, even if this sometimes happened.
>
> Â
>
> I know very well, however, that one courante by Vieux Gaultier exists
> in versions in vieil ton, accords nouveaux and d-minor tuning (the
> latter being the most widely spread, incidentally not found in the
> Livre de tablature).
>
> Â
>
> I simply meant that from the present state of sources I didn't think it
> likely that Denis had to transpose early pieces by his cousin in
> d-minor tuning, as nothing precludes that they were composed directly
> in this tuning (take for instance the Tombeau de Mesangeau, who died in
> 1638, the year in which pieces in d-minor tuning were printed for the
> first time). Stylistically, too, the allemandes, sarabandes and
> canaries by Vieux Gaultier in the Livre de tablature would hardly have
> counterparts in vieil ton sources, or in very late ones, contemporary
> with newer tunings.
>
> Â
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Â
>
> François-Pierre Goy
>
> Â
>
> Â
>
> 10.12.2017, 11:17, "G. C.":
>
>    Dear François-Pierre,
> Â Â Â thank you very much for the learned clarification. Now, if I
> read you
> Â Â Â correctly, you say there is little hope in finding a
> substantial number
> Â Â Â of pieces by Ennemond in vieil ton. This firmly contradicts
> what
> Â Â Â Jean-Marie Poirier has said about this only recently with his
> fine
>    article in The Lute vol. 54, "René, Robert, Ennemond,
> Charles and the
> Â Â Â Other, Shadows and lights: the French lutenists of the first
> half of
> Â Â Â the seventeenth century" where he list a considerable number
> of
> Â Â Â manuscripts that might contain pieces by Vieux Gaultier in
> vieil ton.
> Â Â Â Not wishing to start a confrontation, but it makes one a bit
> confused.
> Â Â Â BR
> Â Â Â G.
> Â Â Â --
> To get on or off this list see list information at
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>
>References
>
> 1. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
>
