Matanya Ophee at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > The lute has never been like any of the other instrument. It was always on > the outside looking in, and as the Sieur Perrine noted in 1697, it will > always continue to be there, as long as lutenists insist on a notational > system that is not shared by other musicians. There is no reason to believe > that the lute in our time will be more successful in reaching the status of > the piano, or even that of the guitar, different than it was at any other > time in history.
For centuries the lute was so much on the inside that it didn't even have to bother looking out. It was so widespread that the idea of playing its music on some other instrument hardly needed to be discussed. Some of the very first published music was in Italian tablature, showing that it was one of the first recognizable markets. Similar evidence can be found in the bursts of lute song publications in England and France after 1600--nobody seemed to think it necessary to publish keyboard versions. Even Morley, who did not play the lute, evidently wrote in staff notation but published transcribed tablature versions: this is evidence that it was staff notation, not tablature, that was considered a barrier to wide dissemination. We have to remember that lute players, then as now, could read staff notation, and played continuo from the first days of continuo, and often played obbligato parts, like those by Bach, Handel and Vivaldi, from staff notation. They did not have to write solo music in tablature, but chose to do so because the system was useful. Matanya's article on tablature transcription (http://www.orphee.com/trans/trans.html#FN3REF) says the comments of Perrine in 1697 and Fran�ois Campion 1716 were "an indication of a general feelings [sic] of malaise regarding tablature." This strikes me as too sweeping a statement based on too little evidence. Tab was alive and well in the 18th century, appearing even in Telemann's Getreue Music-Meister, a publication not directed at lutenists, by a savvy marketer. I'm not sure whether Matanya means to say that the lute will never reach the status of the piano or guitar if its music is not made available in modern notation (which I suspect is his meaning), or whether it will never reach that status in any case (which is what he wrote); but in either case he's correct. There's no reason to think that every other house on the block will ever have a lute in it, regardless of how much music is transcribed. If modern notation were the key to mass appeal, there would be a billion harpists in the world. The phenomenal and continuing growth of the lute (measured by number of players, concert ticket and CD sales, prominence of the better players, sales of instruments) in the last few decades, and the way it has been achieved, contradicts the notion that tablature has hindered that growth. I'm sure nearly all of us came to the lute after hearing lute music played from tablature (I'm guessing two thirds were Bream converts) and found that learning French tab was vastly easier than learning to drive a car or use a computer. Certainly it's easier than learning an instrument or earning the money to buy it and string it. Howard Posner
