estebanana -> RE: Great Grand Daddy of Flamenco (Dec. 31 2012 1:40:47)
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quote:
The author of this article suggests that the last polyphonic work to be published was Fuenllana in 1554. Bermudo calls strummed guitar musica golpeada around mid-century so the strummed style possibly existed about forty years before Amat's treatise. In my opinion Bermudo was more of an authority than Amat. Bermudo was a very learned man and way ahead of this time. Bermudo expressed that he favored equal temperament over various other scale tempering systems like Gerle, half comma, whatever in 1550...ok it took the rest of Europe 300 more years to fully embrace that idea. He also reported on the strumming of the guitar in his 1550 treatise On Playing the Vihuela, so I doubt he was talking out of speculation, he had been there and seen it. And if he mentioned it in 1550 it must have been around for some time before that so that the technique had a history and was therefore worth noting. So anyway, I'm not being weird, but when you said categorically Renaissance players did not strum they plucked....that seems to petty right, to call you out on that, but it is a big deal in understanding early music. As far as Fuenllana being the last one to compose with polyphony or entabulate for vihuela I think that is not quite true or an absolute. There is a slippery slope, at least for me, between species counterpoint and older vocal polyphony and they way it all developed into continuo and baroque counterpoint. There were vihuela playing hold overs into the very beginning of the 17th century, but by that time it had already bloomed and faded away. others have said by about 1585 it was done. I think calling the vihuela game as early as 1554 is premature. Another thing to understand as you read Bermudo is that entabulation is not a composition method or style per se, it is basically a method of arranging pre existing polyphonic compositions to be played on a vihuela. That is why Bermudo goes into great detail on how to construct this or that vihuela stringing and tuning. To back up, those of you who don't know what vocal polyphony is should get a leg up on what we're talking about. Vocal polyphony is a kind of composition written in parts that is sung by a group. It comes out of late middle ages church music and has roots in older music like Byzantine chant. ( which can be quite modern sounding and dissonant). What the vihuela players were doing when they entabulated a piece of vocal polyphony is they arranged these vocal parts, usually four or five, but sometimes two or three, to be played by one person on the vihuela. In the late 1400 to mid 1500's this was a practice that was in vouge in the courts of Spain and Italy and in any houses where the owners had enough money to engage in advanced music training. Juana la Loca one of the royal family of Spain in the late 1400's was said to have only been at peace when she listened her vihuelist play. The music was often taken from liturgical music that was Christian and much of it came from Northern composers from Holland. So Bermudo spends most of his treatise explaining how to arrange this music taking it from vocal lines sung by four persons and basically compressing it so the separate voices can be played by one person on one instrument. So that is what is so compelling about the vihuela because it was one of the first instruments, along with Renaissance lute, in which a single person could play multiple harmonized lines of music. There were books of entabulations compiled by different vihulelists and these could be purchased by those with enough money. They were really the jazz fake books of the day. However it was costly past time and usually only the rich engaged in this form of music as far as we know to date. The excitement that one could play all these vocal lines at once by ones self is the kind of excitement that spurred Beethoven a few hundred years later to say of the guitar in Fernando Sor's era that it was like "a little orchestra of its own". This idea of a self contained little orchestra was realized in the vihuela and that is why it's important in the development of the guitar.
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