On 17 Feb 2006 at 18:56, John Howell wrote: > Again, you are taking a 20th century viewpoint and arguing from 20th > century assumptions. Iconography from the Burgundian court (14th-15th > centuries) show a typical dance band consisting of two shawms > improvising over a cantus firmus played by a slide trumpet. No > percussion. In fact the only percussion shown is the tabor drum of > the pipe & tabor player. If the painters of the time didn't show > percussion, how can assume it was used.
Well, not to dispute your actual point, but it's important to remember that we can't treat iconographic sources as though they were photographs of real events. That's quite clear from the bizarro playing techniques we see in any number of depictions of stringed instruments, or in the keyboards with the wrong number of keys and so forth. The contents of paintings and engravings was often not depicting a real incident so much as it was intended to bring together a number of visual elements for their symbolic meaning. Seen in that way, we can't really say if the relative absence of percussion in period icnography really means that the instruments were not used. Nor would the inclusion of them necessarily prove that they were. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
