Dear Neil, I'm sorry that my reply to your query, which was intended for you and Anthony Hind via the List, was accidently sent only to Anthony. Fortunately he passed it on to the List appended to one of his own messages. I hope you managed to pick it up. In case you didn't, I've appended it below.
I would hesitate in criticising someone for saying the obvious. It's difficult to know the extent of someone's knowledge, and what is obvious to one person may be as clear as mud to another. I recently met a competent guitarist who confessed that he had tried in vain to play the lute. He had given up trying. I handed him a 7-course lute, and told him to ignore the 1st course. When he started to play, his delight was immeasurable. All the chord shapes were the same as on the guitar. Having got past that initial psychological barrier, I suggested he brought the 1st course into use by imagining that the 3rd course was tuned down a semitone. This was a second breakthrough, and he started to make up chords using the 1st course. These were two very simple things, of course, but it meant all the difference to him. Denys is right to say that lutes came in different sizes, and so were tuned to different pitches. However, lutenists in the 16th century were often more concerned with nominal pitch rather than actual pitch. Today we find it convenient to think of the lute tuned to g', and we advise guitarists to put a capo at the 3rd fret. In fact the capo is unnecessary; it might start being useful only if we play with other instrumentalists. I would like to pursue the idea of nominal pitch. As you know, a modern guitar is usually tuned to e'. We call the 1st string e', but we could as well call it f', f#', g', or any other letter. To quote a European politician, we can call it Margaret. If we choose to call it e', this chord is C major: _a_ _b_ _a_ _c_ _d_ ___ If, instead of calling the 1st string e', we called it f'#, that chord would be D major. Why have nominal pitches? Why not call a spade a spade? I would answer by saying that guitarists use nominal pitches every time they use a capo. If you play that C major chord without a capo, you get C major; if you put a capo at the 2nd fret, you hear a chord of D major, but it's easier to think of it as a chord of C major, because that would keep your mind on home territory. In fact it's easier to think of that chord as C major, wherever the capo may be. Another example of nominal pitches is when we sing a scale of doh re mi. The note doh can be any pitch we like. It's the relationship between the notes of the scale which matters, not the pitch of the doh. Vincenzo Galilei uses nominal pitch with the lute as an aid to intabulation. You have just one instrument, but you can pretend it's a lute in A or a lute in C, or in any other pitch, to enable you to intabulate music into a suitable key, so that the music fits nicely on the instrument, and so that it's not impossibly difficult to play. In my last e-mail, I suggested having a cog as an aid to intabulating music for the lute or transcribing lute tablature into staff notation. Galilei goes further than that, giving more than one cog, depending on the note you imagine your lute to be tuned to. Nominal pitch comes into its own with lute songs such as those published by Bossinensis in 1509 and 1511. At first sight it appears that the lute player needs several lutes to be able to match the pitch of the singer's notes. In reality he needs only one lute, and the singer has to transpose his notes to match those of that lute. Bossinensis provides a rubric at the start of each song to help the singer know what the transposition is. The singer's first note is described in terms of lute tablature, for example, "your first note is the same as the 5th fret of the 1st course", or "your first note is the same as the open 1st course". Best wishes, Stewart McCoy. Dear Neil and Anthony, Some sources of lute music give chords. For example, there are lots of chords in Besard's Instructions, which form the introduction to Robert Dowland's _Varietie of Lute-Lessons_ (London, 1610). Here the chords are given to show left-hand fingering. Thomas Mace gives lots of chords shapes in _Musick's Monument_ (London, 1676), but he does so to show that one tuning is better than another. There are chords on folio 1r of the so-called ML Lute Book, i.e. London, British Library, Additional Manuscript 38539, which seems to be a guide for how to realise a figured bass. It is fair to say that there is one important difference betwen the lute and the guitar: you are often required to strum chords on a guitar, but strumming is rare on the Lute. (Newsidler, Caroso?, and occasional French baroque composers are exceptions which spring to mind). Notation reflects performance practice, so the alfabeto system arose in Italy in the early part of the 17th century, because people were strumming their guitars. Lute music tended to be more polyphonic in character, so tablatures were used as the easiest way of showing players what to do. Although it can be helpful to think of chord shapes when playing the lute, it is of less use when intabulating or arranging music for the instrument. If you are unfamiliar with the notes on the fingerboard, it might help to give yourself a cog. Draw a five-line stave and a six-line stave, one above the other. On the five-line stave write down an ascending chromatic scale with all the notes from bottom G (or your lowest course) up to say top e" at the 9th fret of the first course. (That neatly covers all the notes commonly included in the hexachord system.) On the six-line stave copy out all the tablature letters which equate to those notes in staff notation. You can use this conversion chart to transfer notes from one notation to the other. After a while, you become so familiar with the notes on the fingerboard, that you hardly need look at your cog. Best wishes, Stewart McCoy. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
