Bravo! I agree about the "order of difficulty" business. That came from somebody's doctoral thesis that briefly mentioned this MS... andy r
On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 1:55 PM, Stuart Walsh <[1]s.wa...@ntlworld.com> wrote: I'm assuming that the sentence in the intro to Moravian Choralbuch, here: [2]http://www.cittern.theaterofmusic.com/musicfiles/index.html "The manuscript and its music may not be reproduced or published without the consent of the Moravian Archives" refers to the music notation, not attempts - puny amateur attempts - to play a few of these pieces. It doesn't really look to me that the pieces are arranged in order of difficulty. I've tried playing through them, not unfortunately on a cittern, but on a very basic guitar (in fact a Russian guitar with the usual very close string spacings). Perhaps, as has been suggested, these chorales are entirely functional - for accompanying singing - and not ever for purely instrumental performance. The fermata sign is used extensively but when I played the pieces, pausing a bit more (perhaps I'm misunderstanding this?), the music sounded wrong. With a singer - or singers - long pauses would work fine - as I think happens in hymns. And the singer or singers would know the melody and the words... over a lifetime. But it's a shame to have a MS of music and not actually try and play some of it. The pieces are quite short - presumably they have many verses? Now hymn settings with chords on every beat are fine on a keyboard, but not so easy on a fretboard and, I think, chorale settings like this aren't common on plucked instruments. In that respect they are quite hard to play and sound a bit clunky. But that could be just me! I've got four melodies. Firstly I've played them with the tuning GCEgbe. But this is on a guitar with a string length of 65cms. In cittern terms, that would be a big instrument? And it makes some of stretches quite challenging. The close position, low position A minor chords sound impressive. Andy mentioned a possible string length of 50cms so I put on a capo at the third fret giving a string length of about 54cms. So here are four of the chorales, first at modern GCEgbe pitch [3]http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No8.mp3 [4]http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No13.mp3 [5]http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No40.mp3 [6]http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No43.mp3 and here, at the higher pitch [7]http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No8a.mp3 [8]http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No13a.mp3 [9]http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No40a.mp3 [10]http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No43a.mp3 and finally a Minuet from the end of the book: [11]http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/Men3a.mp3 with authentic 18th century plane in the background. Some of these chorales sound sort of familiar and I think there is a long tradition in Germany of sturdy chorale type tunes. I may well be misinterpreting the music and I don't mind having this pointed out! If any offence is taken, I'll remove the files. Stuart To get on or off this list see list information at [12]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html -- References 1. mailto:s.wa...@ntlworld.com 2. http://www.cittern.theaterofmusic.com/musicfiles/index.html 3. http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No8.mp3 4. http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No13.mp3 5. http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No40.mp3 6. http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No43.mp3 7. http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No8a.mp3 8. http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No13a.mp3 9. http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No40a.mp3 10. http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/No43a.mp3 11. http://www.pluckedturkeys.co.uk/Men3a.mp3 12. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/%7Ewbc/lute-admin/index.html