Well I disagree with Monica. As she says quite openly, she is
philosophising, and so it's not a question of her knowledge of just about
everything there is to know about the Baroque guitar and its music.
Just so - I wouldn't claim to know everything there is to know about the
baroque guitar and its music! Or anything else.
Monica's position is rather like mysterianism in the philosophy of mind.
It's all just one big mystery: the stringing , the tuning, the
performance practice of the seventeenth century guitarists- the existing
evidence points anywhere and nowhere. No definitive conclusions (she
philosophises) can ever be drawn.
Why should that be a problem? There are no easy answers to any of these
questions. The problem (to
me) is that so many simplistic theories are put forward by people who don't
seem to have the necessary skills to evaluate the evidence realistically.
To quote just two -
1. because Sanz says that guitarists in Rome used the re-entrant tuning
whilst in Spain it was customary to use octave stringing - all guitarists in
Rome must have always used re-entrant tunings and all guitarists in Spain,
octave stringing. Rome was a large city and he can't have met every
guitarist residing there in the 1660s. Spain is a vast country, which
consisted of several distinct provinces. Sanz can't possibly have known
what every guitarist in Spain did. They are very general observations
based on his own experience. He doesn't even say that his music shold be
played with any specific method of stringing.
2. The "French" tuning isn't mentioned before 1670 - therefore it was
"new" in 1670 - which is bollocks.
Let me quote something else which Ray Nurse says which seems to me to be
very significant.
"Musicology is a historical science and has ends which are quite different
from those of performers, however useful that science may be to performers."
So if the seventeenth century guitarists are hidden away in their world,
it's no surprise that Monica thinks that:
"we can only play the music in a way that makes sense to us today"
Now this is either a harmless truism or a trenchantly radical position. No
wonder she gets into scraps with people!
The reason why I get into scraps with people is because they think that they
can prove categorically that the way they want to play the music themselves
must be the way which the composer himself intended it to be played - and
that everyone who plays it differently is following the wrong star.
This is a falllacy from the start - it pre-supposes that composers intended
their music to be played in a very specific way, always played it that way
themselves, and would object to anyone playing it differently.
This is certainly not the case in our own time, and it is unlikely that it
was the case in the 17th century.
Enough for now (but thanks to those who seemed to support my position).
Monica
Stuart
2008/4/24 Monica Hall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
Well....
There is some doubt as to whether it would have been practical to put a
high octave string on the 3rd course - tuned a minor 3rd above the 1st -
with the kind of gut strings available in the 17th century.
And without doing a detailed analysis - I guess you could make an
equally
strong case for octave stringing on the 4th and 5th courses in this
piece.
Indeed someone has done in the past.
I would say that whichever method of stringing you use there are
idiocyncracies of one sort or another which it is impossible to resolve.
That is the attraction of the instrument.
I have just been reading Ed Durbrow's interview with Ray Nurse in LSA
quarterly and I particularly liked the bit where he say
"Their performance situation was different (from ours) they ate
different
food and smelled worse than we do, they burnt heretics and believed that
the
earth was the centre of the universe!" (and a lot of other things that
seem totally illogical to us today judging by the programmes on the
"Medieval Mind" currently showing on BBC4 over here.
Their world was certainly different from ours and they had fewer choices
than we have.
But don't let my philosophizing deter you from playing the music with
any
method of stringing you fancy. We can only play the music in a way
that
makes sense to us today.
Monica
----- Original Message ----- From: "Rob MacKillop" <
[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "Vihuela" <vihuela@cs.dartmouth.edu>
Sent: Thursday, April 24, 2008 8:19 PM
Subject: [VIHUELA] Sanz and the High G
Here are two versions of Gaspar Sanz's Fuga 1:
a) no bourdons and unison third course:
http://www.songoftherose.co.uk/mp3/bg/sanz/RobMacKillopSanzFuga1.mp3
b) no bourdons and high octave third course - the highest octave on the
thumb side: http://www.rmguitar.info/mp3s/Rfuga.mp3 (on an original
instrument, mid-17thC)
Now, Sanz stipulates (Cf http://www.monicahall.co.uk/) bourdons for
strummed
music and no bourdons for plucked music. Nowhere does he say 'use a
high
octave pairing on the third course'. We've had a few debates on this
list
about bourdons and high ocatves, and I've always accepted that Sanz
should
be played with unison third course and no bourdons, but this fuga makes
me
wonder. In the vast majority of Sanz's music we meet moments where
lines
leap about in octaves, and it never bothers me - I quite like it, in
fact;
it seems to be part of the charm of the instrument. However, when it
comes
to this fuga...almost every line makes musical sense, EVERY line, with
the
high octave on the third, but not so with unison third: this really
stretches the bounds of musicality, not just to our own aestehtics, but
to
what was around Sanz at the time.
Someone like Sanz would have had many different guitars - different
stringing arrangements, different construction, even different pitches.
Is
it not reasonable to suggest that one of these guitars might have had a
high
g, but the guitar he used most for punteado style had a unison g? This
fuga
sits perfectly on a guitar with a high octave third course.
Cue Monica...
Rob
PS Monica - I agree with everything you say on the subject of
stringing,
but
this particular piece...
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