On Dec 21, 2009, at 9:17 AM, Eugene C. Braig IV wrote: > Obviously not, and I should have been more clear. I was referring > to what > has survived of Bach's music bearing a lute designation or > attribution. > Especially if intended for actual rather than idealized > hypothetical lutes > (or lautenwerk), that music still seems to inhabit the realm of > novelty > amongst Bach's output. I have many texts on botanical taxonomy on my > shelves, but I'm not a botanist. I own an excellent jazz guitar, > but have > left even less evidence that I'm an excellent jazz guitarist (for good > reason: I'm not) than Bach did that he was a lutenist with > professional > aspirations to publish collections of lute music.
I suppose you're using "publish" in a loose sense, since Bach had very limited interest in producing printed editions of his music of any kind. He did, however, write a lot of music for instruments on which he is not known to have played professionally, as most composers did. He may well have written lute works because he liked the instrument and knew good players. In any event, we're forgetting the first rule of Bach scholarship: all instrumental works are adaptations from lost cantatas, and everything in the cantatas is adapted from lost instrumental music (except, of course, in those cases where we actually know the works that were adapted). Thus, his Lutheran masses were all arrangements from his lost lute suites. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
