Excuse me if you already know what I'm going to say:
'sesquialter' means, simply, 'one and a half', ie 1.5. It was
represented,obviously, by a rectangle with the long side being 1.5 the
measure of the small side (1:1.5). I would say, that's a triple time, a
rythmic pattern.
Saludos from Barcelona,
Manolo Laguillo
PS A good explanation of this in: George L. Hersey, Architecture and
Geometry in the Age of the Baroque, The Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000.
BTW, the author was a friend of Palisca
Eloy Cruz wrote:
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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