Matanya Ophee at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > 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
The press of deadlines compels me to retire from this discussion. Besides, I have a sneaking hunch that nobody besides the two of us is reading. So I'll just make a few general remarks. Tablature was the way solo lute music was notated for three centuries. It seems that for two of those centuries, no one even complained about it. In the one instance where a tablature system (German) became a problem, it was replaced not by staff notation, but by another tablature system. So it's hard to see it as a "failed system." The lute dwindled during the 18th century and was pretty much extinct as a serious instrument by 1800. There were plenty of reasons for this: at the professional level, inability to adapt the instrument to the demands for sheer loudness imposed by the advent of concert halls and public music-making and the decline, and in some cases annihilation, of the aristocracy and its private musical settings; at the amateur level, the unsuitability of the complicated 18th-century lutes as instruments for dilettantes, especially in competition with the guitar, and association with things old in what was a revolutionary era. It seems to me that blaming tablature is confusing cause and effect. Tab disappeared when the lute did. The recorder and the harpsichord disappeared as art instruments at about the same time for some of the same reasons. And, as you point out, a score of new plucked instruments came and went. Staff notation did not save them. The original point you were making, if I remember correctly, was that more transcriptions of tablature sources need to be made if the lute world is going to expand. Good arguments can be made for that proposition, but the historical unsuitability of tablature does not strike me as one of them. It's certainly not a necessary premise: you don't have to show that tablature was a barrier in 1550 to show that it's a barrier now. HP
