Dear All,
My suspicion is that very often what we regard as "solo lute pieces" are
lute arrangements of pieces originally conceived for other media (or
none at all), hence the title "Intavolatura de lauto", etc. English
music is full of this, the Sharp Pavan being the obvious example: as far
as I am aware no "consort" version survives, but the fact that the lute
versions appear in several different "keys" and have the melody at
different octaves, etc. (in fact it's hard to know what the melody is)
suggests a piece for several instruments.
Even solo fantasias which one might have thought were composed
specifically for the lute have some very difficult passages which result
from attempting to intabulate the part-writing literally (e.g. d1f2f3c4
instead of d1a2c4 which amounts to pretty much the same thing if you
have an octave on the 4th course). Surely if these pieces were composed
for the lute such nasties would never occur?
There's also the issue of accidentals - often we get the correct note
name, but wrongly inflected (e.g. B flat instead of natural, or
vice-versa). When this happens often, it begins to look as though the
"original" was not in tablature.
Also one has to ask whether Francesco da Milano, brilliant though he
must have been, was actually able to invent extended strict canons
without recourse to mensural notation. Some of his pieces are so
intricately worked that the idea that he composed them "on the lute"
seems ridiculous. And indeed, why should he? He was presumably trained
as a singer and would have been thoroughly at home with composing and
performing from mensural notation (and memory). Perhaps it was only
amateur lutenists who needed tablature?
Sorry to muddy the waters further....
Martin
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