Dear Experts,
I have been slowly going through a lovely facsimile of Il Ballarino loaned
to me (thank you James). I'm taking each piece and translating it from
Italian tablature into French. Why? Because I'm still new enough to the
lute that trying to learn two forms of tablature at a time would overtax my
poor brain, and I read the French tab much better than Italian. I'll get to
learning Italian tab later on as I become a better player.
That having been said, in my progress in transcribing these pieces I have
noticed that sometimes a piece doesn't quite flow right with respects to
rhythm when it goes from one repeated section to another. I find that the
repeat back to a section's beginning often plays just fine, but sometimes
that ending going into the next section does not rhythmically flow well.
Other times it flows into the next section perfectly while it flow
imperfectly back to it's own beginning. As I am doing the transcriptions by
hand and then inputting these into Fronimo for playback purposes, not yet
being adept enough to play the pieces back before I hear how they sound,
this is where I find these discrepancies in rhythm. I have taken to putting
into Fronimo first and second endings where it becomes necessary to change
the rhythm pattern of the last measure of a previous section in order that
the piece makes sense to me rhythmically.
My questions are thus; would these changes have been implied by the
composer to the lutenist and thus intrinsically understood by the lutenist
to be there? Would they have been taught by the composer ("yes, here we
change from a minim to a semibreve as we go to the next section")? Or would
the interpretation of the music have been left up to each performer?
Lastly, am I correct in putting these changes into the music itself or
should I be leaving these alone and simply play them as they're written? Of
course we also have the added problem of typesetter's mistakes, but I think
that's more easily overcome in the long run, at least in most cases.
Thanks for your time, wisdom and experience as I continue learn more about
this instrument and its music.
Regards,
Craig
