Thanks David. That makes sense. I suppose we still have a relic of that system with the B flat clarinet where the notation is usually written as if it is in C? Bill Sent from my BlackBerry smartphone from Virgin Media
-----Original Message----- From: David Tayler <[email protected]> Sender: [email protected] Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2012 14:17:47 To: lute<[email protected]> Subject: [LUTE] Re: Pitch names and lute tunings. The lute--and renaissance music--uses a transposing system.. Core tones of A and G are common, but neither is "the" pitch. Even the keyboard uses a transposing system, renaissance diagrams frequently "name" what we call middle C by other names. Most modern musicians, except for clarinet, trumpet and so on, are trained in fixed pitch. Even forty years ago, the two systems existed side by side: my teacher was trained in "moveable Do" and so was I until graduate school. Moveable Do is necessary to understand renaissance theory, "mutation" (the renaming of the hexachord syllables to modulate) and sight-singing. __________________________________________________________________ From: William Samson <[email protected]> To: Lute List <[email protected]> Sent: Sat, April 14, 2012 2:05:38 AM Subject: [LUTE] Pitch names and lute tunings. Dear Collective Wisdom, I was wondering when pitch names began to be associated with the strings on a lute. Nowadays the 'standard' renaissance lute is considered to be in G tuning, with the top string at g. Published books of lute songs seem, by and large to agree with this, with the vocal part(s) in staff notation agreeing with a lute accompaniment on a G-lute. So was 'g' defined as the pitch at which your top string is about to break? I would guess that with the theorbo (an instrument of which I know very little) the theorbo had to agree with the other instruments in the ensemble and conform to whatever pitch standard was in use at the time - though if the theorbist is playing from a bass line (rather than tablature) it's up to him/her to conform with the pitches of the other instruments, regardless of how the theorbo is tuned. It all seems very confusing - Is there a clear association between pitch names and lute tunings? Bill -- To get on or off this list see list information at [1]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html -- References 1. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/%7Ewbc/lute-admin/index.html
