Thanks, Howard. Your first point is right. I was using "mensural music" as an abbreviation of "music already in existence and notated in mensural notation"
The second point is where we differ. You suggest that I am trying to parse, or even retro-parse (whatever that means!) yet the object of the exercise is the opposite of parsing. We are trying to comprehend a text in its entirety and understand its meaning in its context. The context includes the way that specific and perhaps technical terminology was used by people without technical knowhow or experience. Thus, the presumably non-musically trained letter writer Capello tells us that Palestrina "ha cominciato a porre sul Liuto le chirie et la Gloria della prima messa". From my understanding, "porre sul liuto" is exactly the kind of terminology that I would expect an educated sixteenth-century Italian layman to use in this context to express what a professional contemporary like Galilei described as "intavolare sul liuto". Now I'm not trying to fudge up my argument with modern value judgments about what Bach might or might not have been able to do at the keyboard, I'm just trying to understand a text. My understanding of the phrase is that Palestrina "has begun to intabulate on the lute the Kyrie and Gloria of the first Mass". What others have been suggesting is that this means that Palestrina "has begun to compose (or sketch) the Kyrie and the Gloria... on the lute" possibly influenced by Strunk's translation of "porre" as "to set". My point is that, admitting my limited understanding of sixteenth-century Italian, I don't believe the phrase would have been be understood in this latter way by an Italian of the time. I find the other mention of the lute in the same letter much more difficult to understand as precisely. Capello tells us that Palestrina "spiegarà ciò ch’ha fatto col liuto con tutto il suo studio". Here I suspect that there is an implication that some part of the compositional process is taking place as a result of the composer's use of the lute. Your musings make much more sense with respect to this phrase. I promise not to comment further on this topic. JG On 26/02/2010, at 5:49, howard posner wrote: > 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
