[VIHUELA] Canarios

[Eloy Cruz]

Many thanks to Lex, Manolo and Monica

This is certainly a complex topic.

I agree with Lex and Monica that the rasgueado in both canarios y 3+2 
+2+2, starting in anacrusis, hard to play, but when you get into it,  
gives a wonderful offbeat pattern...

The problem is that both in harmony and rhythm there seems to be no  
connection in between the rasgueado and punteado sections. I'm  
puzzled by all these rasgueado sections; am I correct if I say that  
CS4 is the only Spanish baroque guitar book with this rasgueados as  
intro to the punteado piece? and, are they really intros?

Some kind of rasgueado intro to a piece is very common in  
latinamerican music, and in Colombia and Venezuela is called  
registro: I know at least one example where the cuatro (the  
Venezuelan 4-string guitar) makes a strumming registro to the piece,  
which is played by harp, cuatro and maracas, but the registros are of  
a very different kind, they don't follow any pattern and sound very  
much as a little improvisation to prepare the real piece.

The rasgueados in CS4 are not like registros, but many times simply  
repeat the pattern of the piece: in some cases, like Villanos or La  
Jotta, you can actually play the whole punteado piece to the  
rasgueado, they are identical. In other cases the rasgueado and  
puntreado are not identical, like Zarambeques, where some diferencias  
have a different pattern. This change happens also in some mexican  
sones, and is called discante, and works exactly like in Zarambeques.

Some of the patterns in CS4 are irregular, like that of Cumbees,  
where the opening strumming can't be used as an accompaniment.
But the most irregular piece is the canarios por la A, it's probably  
the only one that has a different pattern for each diferencia, or no  
pattern at all.

And 6/4 seems to have no rhythmic connections in CS4: only the two  
canarios and the Paysamos are in 6/4, but punteado canarios por la C  
and Paysanos are in 6/8 straight, while punteado canarios por la A is  
6/8-3/4, very irregular... Yes, Murcia's instructions don't help here.

Thanks Manolo for the sesquialter definition, do you mean it's an  
actual architectural measure o proportion? This proportion in music  
would be simply 2+1, ie. crotchet-quaver, or something like that,  no?

By the way, do you know a book about musical proportions in the  
baroque, I recently was searching for something in this particular  
topic and found basically nothing...


Thanks again and best wishes


eloy



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[VIHUELA] Canarios

[Eloy Cruz]

Dear Monica and list.

Many years ago (back in 1982!) I played the two sets of canarios in  
Codice Saldivar 4, and just decided that the strumming pattern in  
both of them was wrong and simply didn't play it...

Now I want to play them again but the strumming patterns are still  
something I can't understand. I checked Craig Russell's transcription  
and apparently he did the same as me: he decided that they were wrong  
and then corrected them. He says that, although the pieces are  
written in 6/4, the patterns are certainly in 6/4, but for the  
punteado sections, Murcia switches to 6/8, and Craig, for the sake of  
consistency, decided to transcribe everything in 6/8, which is a  
problem. One more problem is that he added some dots to the figures  
in the strumming section and comes out with a completely different  
rhythm as the one expressed in tablature, which certainly is closer  
to the rhythm of the punteado sections...

Obviously the pieces were written by Murcia in 6/4, which doesn't  
mean at all the same thing we understand by 6/4, but tiempo de  
sesquialtera as Murcia himself explains, but the strumming is not at  
all in 6/4, even by modern standards: if the strumming sections would  
have barlines, there would be something like nine 8th notes per bar,  
while the punteado sections have six 8th notes per bar.

I don't really understand Murcia's explanation, what is the meaning  
of  tiempo de sesquialtera? It implies a tempo or a rhythmic  
pattern or both?

Why are the rasgueado and punteado sections so different from one  
another? The rasgueado is offbeat (what we would call in Spanish  
atravesado) and the punteado is on the beat (derecho in Spanish)  
and with an amount of 8th notes per bar different in each one of  
them. In many pieces in CS4, the strumming sections have the same  
pattern as the punteado, so much so that you can use the rasgueado as  
an accompaniment to the punteado, but here it's just impossible. In  
fact, if you play both sections, it's like you are playing 2  
different pieces...

Steve Player says that this rasgueado atravesado could imply that  
there was a form of canario that was atravesado, but I've never seen  
any example of a canario of this kind.

Also, the usual keys for canarios seem to be por la C and por la  
A, these two keys would imply 2 different forms of canario?

Sorry if there are too many questions

Best wishes


Eloy Cruz



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