----- Original Message -----
From: "Gary R. Boye" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, January 18, 2015 2:56 PM
Subject: [LUTE] Authorial Control (was: 16th century tuning and stringing)
All,
I'll throw in one word-of-warning about this subject:
We automatically fall into a modern (20th-century) concept where the
"author" has absolute control of everything in the book: he (or she, on
occasion) writes the music, writes the preface that accompanies it,
organizes it all, and takes it to the printer in a fair copy ready to be
set. But it rarely happened that way. Very often the printer would have as
much to do with the organization and contents of a printed book than the
person named as the author. Sometimes I wonder if the composer of the
music had anything to do with the text in a book and occasionally the
music itself. Sometimes the printer names himself as author when he
clearly is not.
This is not to dismiss the textual instructions in all period books out of
hand. Just to warn that the contents of a printed book in our period of
study can have multiple authors and varying levels of authorial control.
If the preface says: "Put octaves on all your basses," don't automatically
assume that came from the composer of the music in the book. Look at the
context and other evidence that a real "author" was responsible for both
text and music. The preface may have been little more than a convention
supplied by the printer to make the book more marketable.
Gary
--
Gary R. Boye, Ph.D.
Professor and Music Librarian
Appalachian State University
That is so so true - and even more so when you start looking at the
information in some (Italian) baroque guitar books!!!!! I won't stray
further off topic than that.
Monica
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