I agree, Sean's words are perfect...for Sean.
Gary
----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Winheld" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, February 07, 2009 10:23 AM
Subject: [LUTE] Re: Dilettantism
Sean's "2 cents" is pure gold. And not just because of the rotten
economy. Words of wisdom for all of us- Thanks! -Dan
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
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