Dear David,
Many thanks for the link to your recording with Erica Schuller. Lucky you - she has a very nice voice. I measure your speed as just short of minim = 126. (My metronome measures minim = 120 and minim = 126, but nothing in between.) The song works well at that speed, although I wouldn't want it much faster. The notes of the song are relatively straightforward, so many different speeds are possible. However, Thomas Morley's consort setting is a different kettle of fish. One wants to be able to play all those semiquavers, yet not sacrifice a good speed for the sake of eight notes. To be practical, if there was a less able lutenist who really couldn't get his hands round those semiquavers, I would advise him to simplify those eight notes, rather than play the piece too slowly. By the way, I don't think it is necessarily a good thing to be able to sing the whole of the last line in one breath. Singers are trained to sing long lines, and that can certainly help the musical side of things, but so often with lute songs, the meaning of the words comes over more clearly, if sentences are chopped up into smaller groups. Best wishes, Stewart McCoy. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [[1]mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of David Tayler Sent: 24 July 2009 23:21 To: lute-cs.dartmouth.edu Subject: [LUTE] Re: The Galliard I recorded this at minim=140 with tenor Jeffrey Thomas, in retrospect it might have been a bit fast. He could really declaim the text perfectly. Above 120 and you can easily do the whole last section in one breath. Here's another version, I think it is a reasonable tempo, about the same as Valeria and Alfonso I think. [2]http://www.vimeo.com/5735296 One thing about learning it really fast, is that you reach a point and say, this is garbage. Then you slow it down a bit. I think if you look at all the performances of this piece, you will see every tempo imaginable, not just a slow and a fast version. dt -- References 1. mailto:[email protected] 2. http://www.vimeo.com/5735296 To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
