On Feb 25, 2010, at 3:18 AM, John Griffiths wrote: > Thanks David. I know we are splitting hairs here and I mean no > disrespect either, but I presume your opinion is based on your > familiarity with old Italian. I don't pretend to be an expert but your > response says, in effect, that you do not believe that "porre sul > liuto" means "to place [mensural music] on the lute".
But there's no such thing as mensural music. There's music, which can be written in mensural notation or tablature. > I'd be grateful > if you could share the knowledge on which your judgment is based. > Perhaps there is something I have missed in my reading of old texts. > Are you using empirical evidence, or are you just expressing an > opinion? There's a limit to how far parsing old Italian will get you, particularly if you assume that you're trying to retro-parse a musician's term of art. Annibale Capello was the Duke's agent in Rome, a political operative. We don't know whether he was a lute player, or how knowledgeable or careful he was in his musical terminology. But what seems clear is that he heard Palestrina play something on the lute that would not be written down in mensural notation until some future time when "his infirmity permits." It makes sense that Palestrina would use a lute in the process of composing a complex work that could not be fully realized on the instrument. Composers do this all the time. Even Bach couldn't have sat down at the harpsichord and played all the notes in the B minor Mass. On the other hand, your hypothesis that Palestrina would take a fully-worked-out vocal composition and intabulate it to try it out on the lute makes no sense to me. The voice-leading would be fragmented, some of the vertical harmonies would have to be thinned, and he would have to reconstruct the work in his head as he played, which surely would defeat the point of the exercise. For Jessie Ann Owens' views, filtered through the eyes of the Venere Lute Quartet, the notes for the Venere Lute Quartet's "Palestrina's Lute" CD (available from the LSA) are at: http://www.venerelutequartet.com/programpl.html#notes To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
