At 10:19 PM 12/9/2003 -0800, Howard Posner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >Matanya Ophee at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > the fact remains that within 19 years after the appearance of > > the Perrine book, Campion stated that the lute was done for. That is a > > fairly powerful statement > >The translated excerpt in your article says the lute has declined (or is in >decline, or is declining) which is not the same thing; also it seems to say >that the theorbo and guitar are doing well. It is not a model of clarity.
Might be my translation. This is the original text: Je dirai ici que l�usage de la Tablature d�a, b, c, est pernicieuse pour ceux qui veulent faire quelque progr�s sur le Th�orbe & sur la Guitare, & c�est en partie ce qui a perdus le Luth ; car nous voyons des gens qui, avec de la main, du go�t, et de l�oreille, ne peuvent atteindre � la sup�riorit� de ces Instruments. > > and we really have only one way to verify it. How > > many lute books in tablature were printed for general consumption between > > 1697 and 1716? > >I'd think you'd want to know about after 1716. Yes, I would. Not being a lute scholar myself, perhaps you can tell me then what _printed_ tablature books were published in France, or elsewhere for that matter during the 18th century. > > And I would suggest that manuscripts that can be dated to that time period > > are not a reliable measure of the popularity of the instrument. A > > manuscript would indicate a single owner, or a succession of a single > > owners over time. A printed book indicates an existing market. > >Maybe. This opens up a whole new subject, and a fascinating one. It's >clear enough that publication indicates a perceived market (or, less likely, >that the musician or patron had money to burn), but it is not always true >that lack of publication shows the absence of a market. I'm sure that a >musician as famous as Weiss could have sold published editions, since less >famous lutenists did, but outside of one piece in Telemann's Getreue >Music-Meister, he never did. Why not? > >Maybe the answer can be found in Vivaldi, the most famous musician of the >late baroque, who stopped publishing his music about 1730 (he had a dozen or >so opus numbers out by 1730) because he could make more money selling >manuscripts. This is much like a famous graphic artist selling >one-of-a-kind or limited-edition works instead of publishing or >mass-producing them. Rarity drives up the price. Exactly, Which then makes the product available only to a very small segment of the population, the rich. That cannot possibly indicate a wide popularity of the instrument. What is at work here is not a method of publishing a limited edition, but publishing on demand. We do know that the printing technology of the time permitted a fairly substantial number of copies to be drawn from any printing plate. (The number itself is not the issue, but it would certainly be several hundred). How many hand copies were sold? 2-3? 20-30? >And of course, some famous players (as late as Paganini) wanted to keep >their music to themselves, regarding it as a trade secret. Very true. But when you consult a trade publication such as the Whistling-Hoffmeister catalogue, or publishers catalogues and bibliographies such as the Weinmann series, you realize that the sheer volume of publications available to a wide amateur public was overwhelming, and relatively cheap, that special editions of Paganini's (there where actually five of them) where in fact only a small and insignificant indicator of the popularity of the violin. Or the piano, or the guitar for that matter. We are not talking about quality here. 95% of all that output was really bad music. But it nevertheless indicates an existing market. As far as I know, there was no such market for lute books in the 18th century, but I am ready to be corrected. >This is all by way of question rather than answer. Anyway, we can be making >a mistake if evaluate the economics of music dissemination in other times >with the assumptions of our own time. yes, of course. Nevertheless, we do need to understand how music was actually disseminated and if this method, whatever it was, was indicative of a wide market, or only the existence of a small number of aficionados. Regardless of the outcome of such an examination, we can assume that any instrument, would have had a small number of dedicated amateurs who would have kept the flame burning. This is actually the situation we have today. >I don't know, BTW, what the numbers of lute manuscripts and publications in >18th-century France or elsewhere were. I do know that if Campion was >prophesying the end of the lute, he'd be proven right by about 1800. Which brings us right back to the issue of the subject line. Campion was a working musician who made a living at it. Of course, he clearly did not think that a theorbo was a lute, but even so, the mid 18th century explosion of fretted-plucked instruments all over Europe was of such enormous turbulence and diversity, the lyre guitar, the German 7-string guitar, the Cistre (same thing actually), the English guitar, the cetra, the various harp-lutes, the van Heck Bissex, and a score of other failed experiments that populate museums today. As as we can tell, these instruments used pitch notation. Tablature by then was no longer a useful device and it was discarded. Is there a lesson history can teach us here? We have no way of knowing what would have happened if 18th century lutenists had paid heed to Perinne and Campion. But we do know that today, this same failed system of the 18th century is a bottleneck which stands in the way of a wider dissemination of this music. 19th century musicians such as Wassilievsky and Chilesotti understood that very well. Early 20th century musicians such as Ecorcheville, Kozcirz, Koerte and others also understood that, and so did later scholars such as Gombosi, Schrade, Ward, Ness and a score of others. The issue is not one of either/or, or which is a better system for lute music. The issue is how to get non-lutenist to get hooked on to lute music in the first place. That ought to be a fairly simple marketing paradigm. The customer is always right. You can modify his attitude only after you made the sale. Matanya Ophee Editions Orphe'e, Inc., 1240 Clubview Blvd. N. Columbus, OH 43235-1226 Phone: 614-846-9517 Fax: 614-846-9794 mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.orphee.com
