On Wed, 26 Feb 2014 20:10:03 -0000, Monica Hall wrote Monica - are you still reading up? It's really hard to answer without knowing which of my posts you have read so far.
> > First, as I've said before: a guitar accompaniment is not a vaild source > > for continuo realizations! Guitar players where actually known for there > > inability to play sophisticated music (and that's why everyone and their > > grandmother sneered at them). > > This is an outrageous remark. Certainly there were some people in > the 17th century who disliked the guitar and had their own agenda to > pursue. There are apparently some in the 21st century too. Please, no conspiracy theories. Even the very text Jean-Marie posted and you had so much fun translating hints at the guitar's problems (as do many other 17th century sources). > But there is a substantial repertoire of fine music for the guitar - > by Bartolotti in particular, as well as Corbetta, De Visee and many > others. As I have said before - I'm not critisising baroque guitar music. There's indeed some very fine ideomatic music written for that instrument. > Several of the guitar books include literate example on how to > accompany a bass line. These do sometimes indicate that compromise was > necessary because the instrument has a limited compass. Yes, and the more refined these treaties get, the more the guitar gets treated like a "mini-lute". > There are for > examples in Granatas 1659 book where although the bass line indicates > a 4-3 suspension over a standard perfect cadence with the bass line > falling a 5th he has rearranged the parts so that the 4-3 suspension > is in the lowest sounding part. There is no earthly reason why this > should not be acceptable. Sorry, but that doesn't make any sense. You can't have a 4-3 suspension in the lowest voice. You can have a forth between the lowest two voices, but than the higher on would need to resolve downwards to a third. What you describe sounds like a 4-3 voice played an octave to low (or rather, the bass voice being displaced an octave too high), but that would result in a 5th resolving to a 6th [1] ... I'm absolutely convinced that this would make any 17th century musician cringe. This is something that just does never happen outside the guitar world. It's not as if we had no information about how musicians (including amateurs) learned and perceived music. > And no reason why lutenists should not have done the same if this was > inconvenient. For me the issue pretty much is: should I (as a lute player) take as a model an instrument which is severly limited (as a _basso_ continuo instrument) as already noticed by contemporary writers or should I just follow contemporary BC instructions (literally hundreds of them!). When switching from the organ or harpsichord to a lute or theorbo, why should I all of a sudden ignore what I've learned about proper voice leading? With all the stylistic differences between the different continuo styles the common agreement seems to be that continuo should follow the "rules" of music (BC quasi beeing a "contapunto al mente") [2] There really seems to be a great divide between the so-called guitar world and the rest of the baroque crowd. To the later it seems pretty clear that BC was first and foremost a shorthand notation for colla-parte playing. It's rather unfortunate that modern time picked "basso continuo" and not Fundamentbass or "sopra la parte" or "partimento" (the last literally meaning "little score" or "short-hand score"). Cheers, Ralf Mattes [1] unless someone else provides a lower bass voice. [2] im very reluctant to use the word "rules" here. This sounds like something imposed from the outside. Maybe "grammar" would be the more fitting term. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
