Reading this I can't help but feel that you are pressing for an aesthetic that is more a reaction to our modern world than one that reflects a possible 16th century cultural atmosphere....
Check out this excellent article by Liz Kenny... "The uses of lute song: texts, contexts and pretexts for ‘historically informed’ performance" Early Music 2008/02 Here us a bit of the opening.. "Our enthusiasm for printed sources has obscured other ways of approaching these songs, and has artificially divided them from the songs of the next generation. What looks like a perfect balance on paper may or may not have remained so when the songs were performed, and the seductive solitude evoked by a book to be kept and treasured at home may not have always represented composer ‘intentions’, if indeed we can separate these from performer intentions. The ‘miniaturist aesthetic’ of privacy, secrecy and the ‘esoteric’ often define this repertory. ‘Iconographical representations of the lute in performance of instrumental or vocal music ... consist- ently depict a theatre of privacy and solitude ... apart (or distanced) from public, courtly culture.’ This may have been true of one group of performers—the most iconogenic—but it ignores what others were doing in other contexts, very definitely in public." The end (with lots of interesting stuff in-between....) "Early 17th-century musicians faced a challenge which their modern descendents have no trouble recognizing: that of adjusting their personal creative ambitions to different sorts of audience or consumer demand. This is not compatible with a philosophy of one ‘right’ or even one generally preferable style of modern performance based on a careful sifting of his- torical evidence, if the sift eliminates evidence incom- patible with any single interpretative thesis. Modern ideas of ‘public’ and ‘private’ are not always helpful: traces of 17th- century public practice are to be found in privately circulated manuscripts, while widely available printed books facilitated solitary music- reading. To illuminate this repertory from scholarly angles we need not a normative musicology but a more cheerfully disruptive one: we might then use its tools to sharpen a new set of interpretive skills. As Robert Spencer said ‘I see nothing upsetting in that’ " All the best Mark www.pantagruel.de On Mar 10, 2012, at 5:43 PM, Ron Andrico wrote: > We have posted our Saturday quotes on performing lute songs with no > gimmicks: > [1]http://wp.me/p15OyV-lv > Ron & Donna > > -- > > References > > 1. http://wp.me/p15OyV-lv > > > To get on or off this list see list information at > http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
