I have read all the messages in order but there are rather a lot of them and
no reason why I should reply to all of them in detail. To repeat again what
you
actually said...
"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)."
There were a lot of amateur guitarists but many of them were perfectly
capable of playing sophisticated music. In the passage which Jean-Marie has
quoted Gramont says
The King's taste for Corbetta's compositions had made this instrument so
fashionable that everyone played it, well or ill.
The Duke
of York could play it fairly well, and the count of Arran as well as
Francisco himself.
Clearly many of these people could play sophisticated music as well as a
professional player..
The memoires are a witty and entertaining account of life at the Restoration
Court but you don't have to take everything in them at face value.
Some people may have sneered at the guitar but this is very often just a
matter of cultural snobbism which was alive and well in
the 17th century as it is today.
There is no reason why a guitar accompaniment should not be a vaild source
of information about realizing a continuo. Many guitarists were quite able
to do this within the limitations which the instrument imposes and they may
have had a better grasp of the way chords can be used than some lutenists.
Campion actually says that he reccommends his pupils to take a few lessons
on the guitar before starting with the lute.
That will have to do for tonight.
Monica
----- Original Message -----
From: "R. Mattes" <[email protected]>
To: "Monica Hall" <[email protected]>
Cc: "Lutelist" <[email protected]>
Sent: Wednesday, February 26, 2014 9:18 PM
Subject: Re: [LUTE] Re: Bartolotti's continuo treatise
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.
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