Dear Juan, thanks for your post. It's interesting to see what tunings Yepes used to try to make the works more idiomatic in playing. I noticed that not all of his tunings are on the fancy side, 995, 999 and 1000 are in the usual tuning and for 996 he has just tuned the whole lute one tone up. This is the same as playing the Suite transposed to D minor in the usual tuning, which works very well but needs some adjustments in the Prelude and the Gigue. Andre Burguete has argued for this solution back in the nineties, however I'm not really convinced because the tessitura is quite low in this case. His tunings for 998 and 1006a are transposed versions of a D major tuning with the first and fourth course tuned to f sharp (and for the Prelude of 1006a the fourth course would be tuned to g). Although this isn't quite what we would expect a lute to be tuned in the 18th century, the point of playing this pieces in D major (with the normal tuning) is valid in my eyes. Interestingly the Prelude and the Allegro of 998 works better in D major, while the Fugue works better in E flat major. Yepes tuning for 997 is of course absurd from a HIP point of view (C Eb G C Eb G for courses 6 to 1), but it really seems to be the most problematic of the lute works. I still don't know how to play it. Burguete made the point of tuning the first five courses down half a tone, out of some pitch relation reasons. This results in a a third between the sixth and fifth course and descending basses down to the 14th course, which is a tuning he likes to see most of the lute works to be written for. Without this pitch guesswork I would think that maybe there was a fashion in Leipzig to tune 14c instruments this way, with one diatonic bass more and the usual low A or Ab on the 14th course. Like you, as a guitarist I looked forward to play the lute or "lute" works on the Baroque lute for many years, but, I beg to differ, only to find them as problematic as on the guitar. On the guitar we are very much concerned with the limited bass capabilities, but play all kinds of difficult stuff up the neck (at least in modern times). The Baroque lute on the other hand requires keys with as many open strings as possible to sound well and give an idiomatic feel. Having a low, thin tessitura is surely not enough to qualify a piece as lute music, there are severall keyboard works by Bach which look the same when transposed down to suit a Lautenwerk. And the other way round: would anyone recognize a work originally composed for lute when transposed up a fourth or fifth and included in a keyboard collection?
Regards, Stephan Am 5 May 2006 um 9:34 hat Juan Fco. Prieto geschrieben: > Dear lutenists: > I'm posting these two images containing the tuning used by Narciso > Yepes to play Bach lute works. > > http://personales.ya.com/jfppal/Afinaciones_Bach_Yepes_01.jpg > http://personales.ya.com/jfppal/Afinaciones_Bach_Yepes_02.jpg > > This is hard to find and comes from the vinyl version booklet, maybe > the second complete recording after Podolsky, if I'm not wrong. (Do > you know if Michel Podolsky recorded all the Bach works?) This > recording was released some years ago in two CD but omitting this > interesting information. For curiousity only, the baroque lute was > played with nails (as Julian Bream or Konrad Ragossnig did. This was > the "guitarists-playing-lute" time) and it seems he played a pair of > instruments, one of these with 14 courses. More info about this point > will be welcome. A good try and approaching in any case, but detested > by purists, obviously. All my life as guitarist dreaming: "The day > shall arrive I'll play these beautiful works in original tones and > instrument" and I'm now realising, ironically, that maybe these works > are more idiomatic for guitar than for baroque lute, according to the > variety of complex "solutions" proposed to reach a reasonably good > result. The second irony is that these works are with no dubt the best > composed for this instrument. Greetings, -- Juan Fco. > > -- > > To get on or off this list see list information at > http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html >
