Dear Jon:
Boy are you about to have your eyes, or should I say ears opened, much of
the Lute literature is written with two to four moving voices. Simon
Molinaro's music is diabolical in it voicing, mostly two but sometimes three
and four. F. DaMilano is the same thing, usually three moving voices. The
few existing pieces by Peter Philips are all multi-voiced. Cutting enjoyed
weaving more than a voice or two together and once you get into some of
Dowland's Fantasias you will find yourself fighting with two or three at a
time. However I may have misunderstood the point you were trying to make in
your original message. If so forgive me.
Vance Wood.
- Original Message -
From: Jon Murphy [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: Lute List [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Tuesday, December 09, 2003 11:23 PM
Subject: Tab versus Staff
I beg your indulgence for not reading all the postings on the topic, which
are in two different threads.
This newbie to the lute now speaks as a musician. One of you spoke of the
difficulty of following the melody lines of three different voices in Tab.
But the lute wasn't designed to play all the parts of a motet. The voices
of
Medieval and Renaissance times were, in the main, in the same register. I
can play two voices on my double strung harp, but not three (and I'm a
fool
to try the two, a piece for three voices wants three players). Another
said
that the lute could only be played from Tab, and there is a point there if
the tuning intervals are consistant and the players are set to the same
pitch, but I gather there are other forms of tuning. My first couple of
months on lute music were with McFarlane's book of Scots Lute that is in
Staff score with an auxiliary Tab, but it was translated for guitar, so
neither the Tab nor the score matched when I tuned my lute. A month of
working with Tab and I'm begininning to hear the music by reading the Tab.
The initial confusion was with the time notation, but then I realized that
the bass, or drone, notes would ring and had no real time signature.
I'll not go on, I'm too new here - and to the instrument. But it seems the
Tab was developed to write down the music as played at the time. If any of
you have ever tried to read the Staff scores of the time (as I have for
harp) you'd see the Tab was an advance for the fretted instrument. It is
not
a choice between a clearly printed modern staff with each note showing its
own time value, it is a choice between a staff system that is similar in
time structure to the Tab.
Despite the various keys that pieces are composed in, there is no
difference
between the keys except the absolute. The choice of key (pitch) by the
composer is a matter of the range of the instruments he chooses. A choral
piece in G is the same as a choral piece in C, except that the timbre of
the
voices will change the sound, given that the human voice has a certain
range. If the high note of the soprano is at the top of her range then
that
note will be brighter than if the same piece were sung in a lower key. The
same applies to the lute, and all other instruments. The absolute pitch
can
change a celebration into a dirge, but not as the piece changes, only as
the
timbre changes. The limiting factor is the range of the human ear.
Enough again, but I see the Tab as a good notation for the lute. And also
see that the translation could also work. I don't think I could sing from
Tab, so I might want to take a Troubadour's song and put the Tab and the
score together so I could sing and play.
Best, Jon
