I've got a four-course guitar for a short while. I used to try and play
this four-course (mid 16th century) repertoire, years ago, on a baritone
uke and a home-made concoction - without much success or pleasure.
Anyway this current instrument is a good one...but I must admit I can't
make it sound very well at all.
But I'm interested to know what people think about the speeds of the
'plus diminuee' pieces, the versions of pieces with divisions. Leroy's
Third Book has many little dances with second versions of the pieces
with divisions. Perhaps it's important that the 'plus diminuees'
versions are free-standing. Pieces with ornamented repeats might have
been expected. But no, there is a straightforward, 'simple' version and
then the 'plus diminuees' version.
Some commentators (like Harvey Turnbull) have been quite dismissive of
all of this 'amateur' music - which, I suppose, it must have been. But
looking at the 'plus diminuees' pieces again, and trying to play them I
wonder whoever could possibly have played them. As an example, the
straightforward version of Almande tournee (Allemande Loreyne) f.16
feels like a two to a bar tune with running eighth notes. It's a lively
little dance. But, at that speed for the straightforward version, the
'plus diminuees' version is ridiculously, absurdly - freakishly - fast.
But if the 'plus diminuess' version is slowed down to a human level, the
dance is now unbearably, turgidly slow.
Th Spanish guitar books don't have an equivalent of these 'plus
diminuees' pieces. The Spanish guitar pieces can be challenging and
difficult - but not beyond practice and hard work. I don't think the
Gorlier books have anything like the 'plus diminuees' pieces either.
Paul Odette (fastest on earth?) has recorded some of this stuff and it
sounds a bit weird...why turn a dance tune into a sort of machine gun
burst? (And almost all of the divisions are within the first five frets
of a four-course instrument: all squashed into to a tiny space).
So I wonder what these 'plus diminuees' pieces are all about. Is anyone
happily playing them?
Stuart
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