Matanya Ophee at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > So, with the addition of the Milleran quote furnished by Fred, we now have > three commentaries by French musicians about the dangers of tablature to > the general musicianship of the player. > > It could be said, and I would not be able to argue against it, that each of > these musicians, Milleran, Perrine and Campion were not talking as > witnesses of their time, but only expressing their own personal bias.
Actually, I think both Milleran and Campion were speaking of the dangers of relying *solely* on tablature. I agree with them. I've given similar warnings here myself. This is a far cry from advocating the abandonment of tablature, which both Milleran and Campion used. > If we > accept this point of view, we then must accept that every single musician > of the time was acting as an individual with an axe to grind and not as an > impartial observer of society. Since I have never met an impartial observer of society, and have met many individuals with personal biases and axes to grind, I have no trouble accepting it. > Accepting such a view would require us to > discard about 90% of what we have come to regard as the basic tenets of HIP > performance. No, because a consensus, or a majority, or an institution, or a societal norm, or accepted performance practice, is the sum total of a lot of individual biases and axes to grind. Sometimes evidence is conclusive, and sometimes it's irrelevant, but most of the time you have to weigh its probative value against whatever other evidence is out there. One piece of evidence can be consistent with more than one conclusion. You need to look at as much evidence as you can find, and not draw conclusions from isolated bits of evidence if you can avoid it. Mr. X's comment that he doesn't like playing with nails or using octave stringing tells you that Mr. X didn't like playing with nails or using octave stringing. It also tells you that someone else was out there playing with nails or using octave stringing. So if you're trying to establish whether nails or octaves was a general practice, his remark doesn't prove much by itself. So take Perrine. If you have one late 17th-century French commentator who dislikes tablature, you have one piece of evidence about how tablature was viewed in late 17th-century France. What other evidence is there? If there are volumes of late 17th-century or early 18th-century French solo lute music written in staff notation instead of tablature, they would be evidence that Perrine was observing a trend, or starting one. But the absence of volumes of late 17th-century or early 18th-century French solo lute music written in staff notation instead of tablature is evidence that he was just a guy who didn't like tablature. > The increase you notice is not in the number of players, but in the number > of early music ensemble. Unless one lute player is playing all the gigs with all of the ensembles, there has to be an increase in lute players to go with the increase in the number of ensembles. > As for the performing and recording lutenists, I > would wager that between Michel Podolsky, Eugen Dombois, Suzanne Bloch, > Stanley Buetens, Konrad Raggosnig, Walter Gerwig, Julian Bream and Narciso > Yepes, to mention the better known lutenists of the previous generations, > there were just as many professional lute performers then as there are today. I couldn't sleep at night if I took your money on a sucker bet like that. Were I a gambling man (I'm not), I might take bets on whether there are more professional lutenists in London now than there were in the entire world forty years ago. > The fact that Stubbs and O'Dette are directing the BEMF, is > wonderful news, Not exactly news... > but how many other such festivals world wide are directed > by lutenists? Neither of the other two such festivals that I can think of. Howard
