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Overview
Written for musicians by a musician, Meantone Temperaments on Lutes and Viols demystifies tuning systems by providing the basic information, historical context, and practical advice necessary to easily achieve more satisfying tuning results on fretted instruments. Despite the overwhelming organological evidence that many of the finest lutenists, vihuelists, and viola da gamba players in the Renaissance and Baroque eras tuned their instruments in one of the meantone temperaments, most modern early instrument players today still tune to equal temperament. In this handbook richly supplemented with figures, diagrams, and music examples, historical performers will discover why temperaments are necessary and how they work, descriptions of a variety of temperaments, and their application on fretted instruments. This technical book provides downloadable audio tracks and other tools for fretted instrument players to achieve more stable consonances, colorful dissonances, and harmonic progressions that vividly propel the music forward.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253021465 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/04/2016 |
| Series: | Publications of the Early Music Institute |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 315 |
| File size: | 8 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
David Dolata is Professor of Musicology at Florida International University and professional lutenist, appearing at such venues as the Glimmerglass Opera, the Florida Grand Opera, the Northwest Bach Festival, the Miami Bach Society, and on broadcasts and recordings for NPR, CBS, and BBC.
Read an Excerpt
Meantone Temperaments on Lutes and Viols
By David Dolata
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2016 David DolataAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02146-5
CHAPTER 1
Historical Performance, Thought, and Perspective
Historical Performance Situations Involving Fretted Instruments
Following the Baroque penchant for categorization, in 1600 the noted music critic Giovanni Maria Artusi classified instruments into three orders:
1. Keyboard instruments tuned in unequal temperaments
2. Those such as the human voice, trombones, recorders, and so on, that could accommodate themselves to any temperament, equal or un
3. Fretted instruments that are restricted to equal temperament
He furthermore claimed that instruments of the first and third orders cannot play with each other and that those of the second can play with any of them, views that echo those stated by Nicola Vicentino in 1555 and Ercole Bottrigari in 1594. Since we know that fretted instruments regularly appeared with instruments from the other two orders in professional ensemble settings, it is both obvious and fortunate that professional lutenists and gambists either did not get the memo or, if they did, disregarded it. Innumerable paintings illustrating ensembles with both a keyboard and one or more lutes or viols hang in museums all over the world, but, more important, the finest composers continued to specify lutes and viols together with keyboards in their scores long before and after the period of Artusi's writings.
In the 1570s Don Girolamo Merenda described a scene at the Ferrarese court where composer and harpsichordist Luzzasco Luzzaschi was joined by a lutenist in the accompaniment of three singers, who also accompanied themselves on lute, viol, and harp. Theorbists, for instance, are fond of citing Cavalieri's singling out the pairing of the organ and theorbo for the "buonissimo effetto" they make together, a clear contradiction of Artusi's injunction. The Dutch-born Roman engraver and printer Simone Verovio, best known for his publications of Luzzaschi's Madrigali (1601) and two books of Merulo's toccata intabulations in 1598 and 1604, even published two collections, Diletto spirituale (1586) and Lodi della musica (1595), containing a vocal part accompanied by both a keyboard score and Italian lute tablature. As late as 1669, Giovanni Pittoni's two-volume Intavolatura di tiorba includes twelve sonatas da chiesa with a clearly marked "organo" basso continuo part and twelve sonatas da camera with a clavicembalo part, each presented below the theorbo tablature.
Giovanni Battista Doni reported how theorbos, lutes, and harpsichords played together in Cavalieri's Rappresentazione di anima, et di corpo and in Monteverdi's Orfeo, where the composer specified particular combinations of instruments to accompany various scenes — the theorbo appears with both the harpsichord and organ together and in more than one scene with the organ alone. The viola da gamba is also paired with keyboard instruments as well. Following Orfeo, Monteverdi continued to pair the theorbo and viol with keyboard instruments as a matter of course; indeed, the combination of lutes, keyboards, and sometimes guitar formed the core of the opera continuo section throughout most of Europe for the rest of the Baroque era.
Theorbo and keyboard together also continued to be regularly specified in the performance of accompanied madrigals and arias by Monteverdi, Carlo Milanuzzi, Bartolomeo Barbarino, and many others. In the introduction to his third book of madrigals (1619) Francesco Turini wrote:
The madrigals presented here may be played with a keyboard instrument alone, without the chitarrone; or with a chitarrone, or other similar instrument, without the keyboard instrument; nevertheless, they will turn out much better with one and the other. ... Hence to remedy this a supplicated basso continuo part has been given here that can be used not only by the chitarrone but by a bassetto da braccio, a viola da gamba, a bassoon and, as well, other such instruments, all of which go well with the violins but do not have quite the same effect as the chitarrone when played throughout.
In the preface to his Pièces de viole (1689) Marin Marais specified that his viol pieces could be accompanied by the harpsichord or theorbo, the latter of which "ce qui fait très bien avec la Viole." The harpsichord would certainly have been set in some variety of meantone or a closely related temperament. It follows that Marais assumed that the theorbo player would be able to field a suitable version of the same temperament, for a theorbo tuned in equal temperament would hardly sound "très bien" with a gamba tuned otherwise.
We must keep in mind that the theorists cited above and elsewhere did not claim that players of fretted instruments did not play with instruments known to have arranged their tuning systems in unequal temperaments, but rather that they should not play together. It is curious that these theorists simply dismissed the theoretical possibility of what they must have known regularly occurred in real life rather than attempting to discover the methods practical musicians used to accommodate themselves to each other. Perhaps they lacked the practical experience to do so. While these and countless other examples confirm that Artusi's recommendations were either unknown or rejected, the longer such seemingly authoritative statements remain unchallenged, the greater the sense of legitimacy they tend to gain with each reprint or citation, a potency as uncanny as it is unearned.
Sixteenth- to Eighteenth-Century Discourses on Fretted Instruments
Despite the popularity of fretted instruments and the fundamental nature of arranging frets into patterns that produce workable tunings or temperaments, from ca. 1520 to 1760 only around forty players and theorists addressed the arrangement of frets on lutes and viols, divided almost evenly between Italian and non-Italian sources. Many of these sources are manuscripts, and quite a few of them do not actually confront how to position the frets. This unexpected dearth of practical advice in historical writings addressing such an elemental chore could easily lead one to believe that setting and maintaining frets is not something lutenists and viol players must attend to every day. And yet we must. Our predecessors certainly set and maintained their frets just as assuredly as they tied their shoes, but, like tying their shoes, it was not something they chose to write about all that much, obviously considering it to be "craft knowledge," that is, "professional knowledge gained by experience ... but which is rarely articulated in any conscious manner." Professional musicians who made their reputations primarily as performers were particularly reluctant to reveal their secrets for reasons we discuss below.
Motivation to Publish or Refrain from Publishing
Players are naturally much more interested in what the best players do than what nonplaying theorists write they should do. After all, it is Guitar Player not Guitar Theory magazine that has been so popular since 1967. Published instruction of this nature that can now be found at any bookstand or online, however, has not always been quite so available. Diana Poulton and Tim Crawford begin the "Technique" section of the Grove entry on lute with: "Several writers of instruction books for the lute have remarked that many masters of the art were, as Mace put it, 'extreme Shie in revealing the Occult and Hidden Secrets of the Lute.'" Further on Mace laments that when great masters die, their secrets die with them. This, Mace tells us, is one of the primary reasons that, up until his book's publication, the lute was so difficult to learn.
Alluding to craft secrets, Modenese lutenist Bellerofonte Castaldi (1580–1649) plainly enunciated his thoughts on the matter in the advice to performers in his Capricci a due stromenti (1622), containing theorbo music of a level that would be inaccessible to all but the most advanced players: "Advice on ... the tuning of the instrument ... is not given here, because he who can securely play this tablature will already know these things." Although as an aristocrat Castaldi did not expect to derive income from his musical activities, his attitude toward providing pedagogical information was somewhat typical. Virtuosi whose fame was founded exclusively on their performance ability felt no obligation to provide lesser players with the tools required to join their ranks, fearing that revealing their closely guarded professional secrets would somehow diminish their status or marketability. Why increase your competition?
Even worse, how dare you reveal trade secrets? Following the publication of his Prattica di musica (1592/1622), contemporary professionals accused Ludovico Zacconi of "having dared to expose the innermost secrets of music, and thus undermining and devaluing the importance of the personal transmission of an art that, by tacit consensus, no one had ever fully revealed." The subtext is clear: if you disseminate practical musical knowledge in a readily accessible form, you run the risk of reducing the need for private tutelage. Few things provoke more outrage than threatening one's livelihood.
On the other hand, there were those with a wider view, such as Mace and Bermudo, who lamented: "What a pity it is (and those who have Christian understanding must weep for it) that the great secrets of music die in a moment with the person of the musician, for lack of having communicated them to others." According to Poulton and Crawford, "The training of professional players was almost certainly carried on through some system of apprenticeship, and this may well be one of the reasons why comparatively few books give really informative instructions on all aspects of playing technique." Penelope Gouk furthermore suggests, "The knowledge possessed by artisans was usually transmitted orally, comprising a body of secrets kept within the crafts.
The practice of providing elementary playing instructions for fretted instruments began with Petrucci's publication of Spinacino's lute music in 1507, yet these and those that followed for all manner of fretted instruments with increasing frequency throughout the next two centuries include very little useful or coherent information regarding how to arrange frets. Perhaps they considered such information too basic, or, on the other hand, they may have just assumed, as many did, that the frets must be set by ear.
John Dowland's inexplicably unworkable fretting instructions that appear in his son Robert's Varietie of Lute Lessons (1610), loosely based on Gerle's instructions of some eighty years prior (1532), are so garbled that they cannot be taken seriously, resulting in an irregular utilitarian temperament that is not so utilitarian. They begin with a historical précis of sorts on tuning replete with references to Pythagoras, hammers, Babylon, and God, and do nothing to dispel the impression that his instructions were intended more to impress than inform. An additional clue to Dowland's motivation may be gleaned from the fact that twice in the same paragraph he mentions how skillful lutenists and violists set their frets by ear; for the rest of you, here are some instructions. In a most entertaining description of the chaos, Mark Lindley attributes the cascading errors in Dowland's instructions to the work of gremlins.
As we have seen with regard to Dowland's instructions, it is wise to interpret the essays on tuning and temperament found in early treatises contextually by evaluating the writers' motivations for including these virtually obligatory exegeses. Tracts such as Dowland's can often be properly considered erudite displays designed to demonstrate either the author's mastery of classical theoretical musical concepts or his membership in the vanguard of the latest musical fashion rather than practical advice. The former generally advocate Pythagorean tuning or Just intonation, the latter, equal temperament. Each of these systems also linked theorists with a greater authority with whom or which the contemporary theorist could be associated: Pythagorean tuning of course to Pythagoras, Just intonation to Nature, and equal temperament to Aristoxenus or Art. Theorists and those who fancied themselves as such concentrated their attention on the science of temperament, whereas practicing musicians focused on the art of temperament. The former often obsessed about describing a perfect world, while the latter confronted the real world.
General Approaches to Setting Frets
In his chapter regarding how "To Fret the Common Vihuela," from his Declaración de instrumentos musicales (1555) Juan Bermudo wrote, "You will rarely find this instrument well fretted, except the ones used by those exceptional players, who place them by good ear." John Dowland asserted that skillful musicians can set their frets by ear, but that the less skillful require instructions. As Bermudo did fifty-five years earlier, Dowland then went on to explain a method for placing the frets for nonprofessional players who are unable to set them by ear. Artusi reported that the lute maker Venere told him that he positioned the frets by ear as did other fine makers. Much earlier, Juan de Espinosa (1520) suggested that players tune by ear to create their own personalized systems. Craft knowledge.
The most consistent tuning advice found in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century lute and viol publications is to adjust the frets up or down by checking unisons and octaves after tuning by ear or by referring to some sort of measuring guide derived by formula or provided by the lute or viol maker. Among the notable composers, theorists, and performers to recommend this approach are Luis Milán (1536), Sylvestro Ganassi (1542–1543), Pietro Aron (1545), Martin Agricola (1545), Alonso Mudarra (1546), Vincenzo Galilei (1581), Gioseffo Zarlino (1588), Ercole Bottrigari (1599), John Dowland (1610), Michael Praetorius (1619), Mary Burwell's lute tutor (ca. 1660–1672), Thomas Mace (1676), Jean Rousseau (1687), and Le Sieur Danoville (1687).
Real-Time Refinements
Aron (1545) and Bermudo (1555) wrote that lutenists can adjust the pitch by reducing or increasing the left-hand pressure. After explaining how lutenists and viol players set their frets with equal semitones compared with the unequal semitones that prevail on keyboards, Bottrigari (1599) then asked the very reasonable question: How then can these instruments play together if they are tuned differently? He responded by explaining that good players are able to match another instrument's pitches "with diligent application ... helping himself by placing the finger a little higher or a little lower on the fingerboard when he feels the need" — clearly a real-time adjustment. Praetorius (1619) wrote that even though their instruments are tuned in equal temperament, lutenists and violists can aid intonation with the left-hand fingers. He made it clear that the goal is to emulate a keyboard with split black keys, which provide both the mi and fa (sharp or flat) version of the note. Praetorius goes on to give this ability to alter the ostensibly equal-tempered notes as the reason that an equal temperament fretting pattern on lutes and viols is therefore not disturbing.
Prior to the invention of wooden body frets by Matthias Mason as described by Dowland in his son Robert's Varietie of Lute Lessons, lute music required stopped notes where the frets would have been had they existed, the execution of which Le Roy's Brief Instruction (1574) refers to in the Seventh Rule. Indeed, Ganassi describes having heard Alfonso da Ferrara, Giovannbattista Ciciliano, Francesco da Milano, and Rubertino da Mantova play beyond the frets "with such good skill and to such good effect that one would have thought that there were frets there." Surely, lutenists and viol players who were accustomed to playing beyond the frets would not feel put upon to adjust the tuning of individual fretted notes.
It is best, of course, to set the frets as close as possible to the required pitches and to reserve pulling and pushing for those rare situations that cannot be addressed by clever fret arrangements. To be sure, pulling and pushing are advanced techniques, but they can be effective arrows in the virtuoso player's quiver, especially on single-course instruments such as viols and the theorbo.
Pythagorean Tuning
Theorists like Bermudo who did not themselves play or in some cases even understand fretted instruments often received their information secondhand by copying from another theorist or relying on the authority of someone else who may or may not have been reliable or knowledgeable. For example, nonplayer theorists who often treated topics other than music as well, such as Oronce Fine (1530), suggested Pythagorean fretting schemes based on monochords that owe more to theory than practice. (For a detailed description of Pythagorean tuning, see chapters 4 and 5.) A monochord with one string is one thing; a six-course lute with eleven strings is another. Recommendations such as Fine's are totally impractical for virtually the entire solo lute repertoire, although they may be of some limited use in ensemble music that features predominant fourths and fifths. By 1530, were he a player, Fine would most likely have encountered Petrucci's publication of the lute tablatures of Spinacino, Dalza, and others, which are replete with major thirds that preclude the use of Pythagorean tuning.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Meantone Temperaments on Lutes and Viols by David Dolata. Copyright © 2016 David Dolata. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
List of Diagrams
List of Tables
List of Audio Files
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part One: Precedent
Part One Introduction
1. Historical Performance, Thought, and Perspective
2. Surviving Fixed Metal-Fret Instruments
3. Fretting Pattern Iconography
Part One Conclusion
Part Two: Theory
Part Two Introduction
4. Inside the Numbers: How Tuning Systems Work and Why We Need Them
5. Tour through Tuning Systems
Part Two Conclusion
Part Three: Practice
Part Three Introduction
6. Physical and Environmental Factors
7. The Zen of Tuning
8. Continuo
9. Viols
Conclusion
Appendix 1: Cleartune
Appendix 2: Equal Temperament Offset Charts
Notes
Bibliography
Index
What People are Saying About This
This book is welcome, aiming as it does to combine the historical, theoretical, and practical aspects of this sometimes vexed and controversial topic in a lively and approachable manner.
This book will go a long way towards destroying the myths of many well-intentioned, but ill-informed scholars and performers.