I defer to Arthur in all things Francesco, however as an issue of performance practice, not musicology, I still hold that the beginning of a piece may be in free time, and that there is no urtext or composer's intent except in very rare cases (Byrd). As we can see from John and Robert Dowland, a seemingly linear succession from teacher to student can be shown to have the opposite effect: the copyist copies; the student rewrites. In the absence of holograph material, which is itself not an urtext, as composers wrote multiple versions of the same piece, we simply have the diversity of versions, which is richness & copiousness. Editions which bring together multiple sources create new, previously unknown versions.
However, I defer to Arthur in all things Francesco :) From wisdom comes truth. dt To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
