From my own experiance I would argue the other way but strongly believe
both approaches are valid.
For the past 8 years I've played only 6c lutes. The "course cap" was
entirely deliberate to cut down on instrument and genre overload.
Rather than having one 6c to play the pre-1600 rep, I have 3 (and,
alas, soon 4) and rather than have more genres to fill out my education
on what's-out-there-and-how-to-play-it, I have a variety of timbres,
note sustainments, brightnesses, etc to explore. It also promotes a
left hand elasticity w/out my right hand looking for basses and new
thumb positions.
When I first started this experiment the 'rule of thumb' was "what was
available to one person's lifetime if he had died ~1595" which I
thought would give me a pretty big window. Huge window, in fact. It
turns out that most of the books I have would not have been available
to an amateur player or even a successful professional and even then,
I'm not sure he'd want to be hampered by having to keep on top of all
that diversity. So in any year I let go of Johnson to hike through
Phalese for a while (an endless while, mind you) which I let go of to
play Spinacino which is let go to play Blindhammer and then experiment
w/ Buxheimer and the 15th century and then get called back to VGalilei.
And the cycle continues. (For those of us worried about HIP
performances, we should know that no ren player ever played w/ as much
variety as we. It seems obvious but distraction is the enemy of focus.
We can play ren music on ren instruments but we'll never be ren
musicians. We're curators at best)
I have a huge stock of English solos and trios (bass viol, cittern,
lute) for which this approach works fine but Cutting (for example, whom
I love) it is touch-and-go. I can translate the basses of Anne
Markham's Pavin well enough but my favorite Sans Per Pavin is out of
reach. It was a difficult decision but I'm at peace w/ it. Most of the
English golden age song rep is doable too but brings me to the edge of
what's possible on a 6c. And plenty of people play Dowland just fine in
my neighborhood; they don't need me to muddy the water (John Smyth's
Almain is good to go, and I'll just have to be content having heard
the fantasies a zillion times ;)
And yes, I have to tiptoe through Molinaro (another fave) but the
trade-off is that I know the background of almost every chanson in
Spinacino and can play most of them to my satisfaction. I can buy
recordings of Molinaro and occasionally hear him in concert but I can
also arrange a Spinacino-based vocal performance which I would never
hear otherwise --or want to-- and learn a heck of a lot along theway.
I have also found that I dug way deeper into the 6c repertory than if I
had been splitting my time between Hely, Kapsberger, Dowland, Wiess
_and_ been on the lookout for basso continuo jobs. I enjoy what I've
learned and realize that it couldn't have happened otherwise.
Then again, I could have explored even more if I didn't split my time
w/ work. But probably still would have been content in a solely
6c-world.
My 2 cents.
Sean
On Feb 7, 2009, at 7:43 AM, David Rastall wrote:
On Feb 6, 2009, at 7:11 PM, [email protected] wrote:
Isn't it possible that playing several plucked instruments can be
mutually reinforcing? If I spend all day playing the vihuela, won't
that improve my lute playing? If I work on achieving perfect,
pearl-like tones on my six-course, won't that improve my tone on
the
ten-course? If I learn to play the bass strings on my baroque lute,
won't that help me on the theorbo basses? If I learn to play
continuo
on the theorbo, won't that make me a better all-round musician?
Agreed. Absolutely.
The lute world consists of a diversity of instruments, and off-hand I
can't think of any professional virtuosi who have confined themselves
to just one of them. My point is that I don't think their virtuosity
has been diminished by the variety of instruments they have recorded
on.
Davidr
[email protected]
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