Amen to all of that! Rob -----Original Message----- From: doc rossi [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 13 April 2005 07:14 To: Cittern NET Subject: Re: Geminiani
Ok, here we go. I agree with Stuart that G's music really stands out in the literature - he was a great composer, a great marketer, too, and someone who seems to have taken his calling very seriously. He had a traditional musical education but was also a bit of a renegade and innovator. I guess that's another way of saying he was adaptable. Lesser composers like Noferi and the Merchis suffer in comparison because they just didn't have the compositional chops. Some of Merchi's publications for cittern are the same as those for the guitar, transposed to suitable keys. For me, music like theirs is only superficially "guittar" or "cittern" music - I don't think they knew the instrument any better than G did, and being the musician he was, he may have only needed a few hours of study to understand it as a composer and adapt his violin technique to suit. I think it would be a useful exercise to do a systematic comparison between his violin and cittern tutors. I've only given the former a cursory look. This is not to say that Noferi or Merchi or other "lesser" composers didn't take their work seriously. It's difficult to make a conclusion without passing judgement, but their music just isn't as creative or imaginative. It's "simple" where one might see G's as "complex", and along with him I would put Demarzi, Straube and maybe Marella. However, the simplicity in Noferi's and Merchi's music, for example, is not the same as the simplicity as, say, Oswald's music. I would put his music on the level of G's even though stylistically they are worlds apart, and I guess this is where I disagree with Stuart, and where I start to get a bit ranty about citterns and Grove and all the "academic orthodoxy". I'm an academic myself, so please understand that I'm not taking gratuitous potshots at anyone. So, the idea that G's cittern music has less value than his other works, I would say that they haven't considered it properly. And consider also that many of the pieces Straube published for cittern turn up in his baroque lute manuscripts - do they have less compositional value because they have been arranged for a different instrument and make excellent use of that instrument's resources? There has been a tendency in orthodox scholarship to put some instruments above others because they have greater range of notes, dynamics, colors and other criteria. I find this view limited and limiting. Instead, I find it more useful to discover an instrument's idiom, or distinguishing characteristics, if you like, and go from there. Does this put me in the glass-half-full rather than glass-half-empty category, make me an optimist rather than a pessimist? Maybe so, but I think it does take me out of the Darwinistic way of looking at things in that I see change and variation rather than development or decadence. I can see that I'm about to go off on a long rant, so I'll put on the brakes, but before I do, I'll just make a small suggestion. The next time you find yourself wondering whether an "English guittar" or Portuguese guitar or some other instrument is a cittern or a guitar or just what the **** it is, think about all the instruments out there that are known as guitars - scholars, for some reason, have no difficulty categorizing this infinite variety as guitars and constructing a history that includes them all, but when it comes to citterns, they drop into talking about "true" citterns and such as if there were only one type that was the summit of development and everything since as some sort of bastardization. If one can think openly and inclusively about guitars, why not about citterns? Thanks, Doc To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
