Dear Vihuela list,
a few days ago William Bartlett contacted me following an exchange of
ideas about Bermudo etc on this list. I thank him for contacting me
because I didn't know that this particular mail group existed, so I
have just joined up.
I also downloaded and read Michael Fink's paper with interest and
have a bit of feedback. This business of stringing and tuning still
has a bit further to travel, but it is good that someone has
attempted to gather the information together. So, thank you Michael.
At the same time, I don't think we have it exactly right yet. The
insuperable problem is that we still have insufficient information to
be able to arrive at definitve conclusions. That means that we finish
coming to our own beliefs about what was practised centuries ago.
Beliefs, as distinct from knowledge, are more personal, and are often
strongly coloured by our own views on the world.
What I would specifically like to comment upon in relation to
Michael's paper has to do with taking a broader view of what the
world sounded like four hundred years ago. Michael gives us some
wonderful examples of cases where the four-course guitar needed to be
simultaneously strung for re-entrant tuning and for use with
bourdons. Somewhere in all of this is the fact that there was an
increased desire during the sixteenth century to play serious
composed music on an instrument probably originally conceived for (a)
different function(s). The sixteenth-century repertory shows the
great skill of composers and arrangers to make sophisticated music
for a rather simple 4-course instrument with real limitations. For
musicians with real concerns about hearing 6/4 sonorities where root-
position harmonies are preferable, the solution was to buy a lute or
a vihuela with more strings. If you couldn't, you probably just had
to make do. The ear can learn to accept this compromise.
On the specific conclusion that Michael makes on pages 6-7 of his
paper about Mudarra, I would suggest considering interpreting
Mudarra's comment The guitar... has to have a bourdon on the fourth
course as primarily aimed at getting players not to play with a
fully re-entrant fourth course (both strings high). This to me is
more important than whether the strings are unison bourdons or with
bourdon + octave string. So, Michael, I would rethink or extend your
paragraph on page 7 about the 1547 guitarist. He may have had both
strings requintadas before reading Mudarra's statement.
Incidentally Michael, your example of the temple viejo on p. 7 needs
the lowest course to be a tone lower, F rather than G.
The difference between unison bourdons and octaves needs also to be
considered in terms of timbre rather than counterpoint: the purpose
of octave strings is for sonority not for pitch. Nobody wanted to
hear parallel octaves all the time. The purpose of octave strings is
to reinforce the harmonic series of the bourdon, and to add duration
to thicker gut basses that otherwise die away very quickly. My own
experience with gut strings in the bass is that is also much harder
to get two bass strings from gut that are in tune all the way along
their length. My experience with Peruffo's loaded gut basses on my
vihuela was not good when I tried unisons, but fantastic using the
loaded gut bass with an octave string -- in terms of both pitch and
sonority. Getting the tension right between the octave and the
bourdon is part of the trick. If you hear the result as a bass plus
and octave string, then I suggest the tension is not right. I think
it should sound as one single blended sonority in which the sound of
the octave string is but part of the total harmonic series.
I would also be more cautious about the speed with which the new
overtook the old around 1600. We still have very large lute books
being compiled and or published after 1600, and many players/
composers who were not interested in changing to the latest fashion.
I would therefore suggest that Michael's interpretation of Cerreto's
comments on the guitar need to be considered in a broader context.
Naples was not fast in taking up the new Florentine style, and
Neapolitan instrumental music appears to have maintained its densely
Spanish character into the early 17th century. To me, Cerreto is
telling us that the guitar in 1601 was still being played by some
people with its old re-entrant tuning, perhaps in the same way as a
century or more earlier when it replaced the original guitarra (ie.
gittern = small lute) as the treble instrument in lute duos such as
those in the Petrucci books.
In the continual process of revising our earlier opinions, I also
recommend reading Renato Meucci who has recently published an
important new study about Neapolitan guitar construction and
evolution at about this period:
Da `chitarra italiana' a `chitarrone': una nuova interpretazione.
Enrico
