Wayne,
Yes and no. Certainly, lutenists of the past were
not into "early music" the way we are now, but many of
the "greatest hits" of past eras remained popular well
into periods in which the mainstream style - or the
lute itself - was quite different.
Just look at the Augsberg manuscript that contains
most of the works of Hagen. This very late collection
contains "La Belle Homicide" by Denis Gaultier. This
is at least a hundred years out of date - and talk
about stylistic dissonance! Gallot shows up in the
London manuscript, too. This would be like a someone
today having a song by T-Pain and the Tin Pan Alley
song, "Shine Little Glow Worm" on his or her iPod. Of
course, there are other examples - Francesco's music
outlasted the six-course lute for which he wrote.
I also believe this road of super-specialization
(i.e. _must_ use a 7-course for this piece, _only_ a
9-course for this..., etc.) is an _extremely_
dangerous road to go down for the entire field. Its
great to really get into a particular style or
composer. Ideally the insights gained by spending a
lot of time with one period or lute should help you
grow as a performer and strengthen your skills with
other repertoire. I've always believed that variety
is the spice of life. However, when we specialize TOO
much all we really end up doing is boxing ourselves
in. How can you program a whole concert that
features, for example, "Italian Music, 1538-42" or
"German Music, 1712-20" and have it interest anyone
but diehard specialists? I personally love music from
both of these periods, but I have to confess that a
whole concert of either puts even a fan like me in the
mood to snooze after about 20 minutes.
This also starts to sound ominously like the
philosophy laid out in Milton Babbitt's 1958 essay
"Who Cares If You Listen?" (interestingly, the
original title was "The Composer as Specialist")
stating that it didn't matter if a regular audience of
Joe Blows related to a composition at all: what
mattered was that the piece remained faithful to a
system of arbitrarily selected parameters that were
academically accepted by a small group of
self-appointed cognoscenti. Well, were is Babbitt's
music today? If a student tried to major in
composition at a university in 2007 and submitted
pieces with the application inspired by Babbitt's
parameters they'd be laughed out of the room. And
were is this style of music on the concert stages?
Too much artificially academic specialization has
lead to the absolute downfall of contemporary music in
its entirety as a legitimate cultural force.
Contemporary classical music is still present at the
university level were it is supported by grants and
endowments as if it were some kind of research rather
than art. But no one really pays it much attention or
respect. (I've played on contemporary music festivals
where the paid professional performers literally just
barely restrained themselves from laughing during the
performance. On this list, I can't repeat some of the
words used in rehearsals, but the phrase "this piece
makes me want to puke" shows very regularly.)
The fortunes of early music seemed to have wained
in the past ten years or so. Why draw a line in the
sand about something as trivial as whether having an
extra two strings on your instrument is an offence
against the lute gods or whether you may allow your
eyes to stray forward or back ten or twenty years
along the time line?
Chris
--- Wayne Cripps <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> I would think that in the old times, a lutenist
> would mostly play
> music from his or her time. They obviously would
> not play
> anything from their future, but I am sure they were
> mostly
> not too interested in music of the past, except
> perhaps for
> a few master works. I doubt that lutenists were
> into "early music"
> the way we are. Which means that if we are really
> trying to
> recreate the sprit of those times we to should
> probably select
> one time period and stick with it.
>
> Wayne
>
>
> > From: "gary digman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> >
> > I'm a little perplexed by this discussion. Is the
> assertion being made that
> > lutenists who played 10c lutes at the inception of
> these instruments only
> > played music specifically written for 10c and
> ceased playing music that
> > appeared before unless they also had a 6c, 7c or
> 8c instrument?
> >
> > In the 10c repertoire a given piece of music will
> sometimes go several
> > measures without anything happening in the
> bourdons. Would not these
> > passages be subject to the same problems
> supposedly accompanying
> > (accompaning?) the playing of 6c, 7c or 8c music
> on the 10c?
> >
> > Gary
> >
>
>
>
> To get on or off this list see list information at
>
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
>
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