On Jul 20, 2013, at 1:11 AM, Martyn Hodgson <[email protected]> wrote:
> Indeed Kuhnau did press (unsuccessfully!) the church authorities for > one or two instruments to play continuo which he called gallichons Is anyone aware of some piece of evidence as to what the town council actually did about Kuhnau's gallichon request? I've conversed with persons equally sure that the purchase was approved, but they couldn't tell me how they knew. I'm intrigued, come to think of it, by the notion that the player(s) wouldn't simply supply his/their own gallichons. Maybe the instrument was new to those parts in 1704. > Further, a few other contemporary composers (noteably > Telemann) wrote church cantatas with a designated gallichon part (NB > playing from a thorough bass part and not an obligatto lute part as > Bach requires in this Passion). But this does not amount to gallichons > being in 'common use' at the time (personally, being a gallichon > player, I wish otherwise - but wishful thinking is, alas, not solid > evidence for historic usage). Kuhnau's statement that "we always have to borrow" gallichons is pretty strong evidence that they were commonly used in Leipzig churches early in his tenure as Cantor (responsible for music in the town's churches) there. It is evidence, if less strong, for their use by his successor Bach 20 years later. Matheson's statement that gallichons were useful, and lutes useless, in church is pretty strong evidence for gallichons in church generally. (It's also evidence for lutes in church, else Matheson wouldn't have made his denigrating remark about lutes.) A rarity of scores that specify gallichon means very little, because continuo instruments were rarely specified. You could just as well conclude, from the lack of scores specifying harpsichord, that harpsichords weren't used in one setting or another. > Whilst Bach might occasionally overlook designating a particular > obbligato instrument, that is not the case here where he clearly calls > for the lute (ie not gallichon or mandora). If he had required a > gallichon there's no reason to suppose he wouldn't have used the term > (as his contemporaries did - see above) You just made a compelling case for regarding the statistical sample of gallichon designations as inadequate, so seeing above doesn't get us very far. > and that he was so ignorant or > vague as to employ a generic term for all fretted plucked instruments. He might use a generic term not because he was being vague or ignorant, but because it didn't matter. He wasn't publishing a score for use outside the Thomaskirche, and he wasn't writing for our benefit. He knew what instrument the player was going to bring, and if the player always brought a gallichon, that's the instrument Bach would have expected. > In short, the burden of evidence points to Bach expecting the (Dm) lute > proper in this Passion - any technical difficulties in playing what he > wrote to be put down to his relative unfamiliarity with the detailed > technical demands of the instrument. No doubt the player would have > adjusted the part to make it technically possible (as in the > intabulations we have of the lute works by contemporary lutenists). I'm not sure why you keep bringing up the notion of technical difficulty, only to knock it down as a straw man. Nobody else is mentioning it. The argument for gallichon is that it projects better in a large space and, being a continuo instrument, is likely to have been present in the orchestra already. I jumped into the conversation only because you made a blanket statement that there is "no evidence" that Bach had gallichon in mind. Obviously, there is evidence in the form of his predecessor's use of gallichon, and indications that the gallichon was the preferred instrument in churches. The question of instrument choice makes more intriguing the question of why Bach replaced the lute/gallichon obbligatos in the St. John and St. Matthew passions with organ in the St. John and gamba in the St. Matthew. Did he find the original instrument unsatisfactory? Did he write the parts for a specific player who retired or died or was traded to Hamburg for a violinist and a singer to be named later? -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
