estebanana -> RE: Building a reconstruction of a Renaissance Vihuela (Nov. 24 2013 12:56:20)
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Hi Ed, I was picking up email and glanced at your question. I'm not really participating very much.... Anyway, here is the deal. The Vihuela is basically the same as the Renaissance six course lute, but with a different body shape. During the 15th and part of the 16th centiry Spain held dominion 0ver parts of Italy and there was a lot of commerce between the two countries and a much cultural interchange. The Spanish developed a version of the Italian six course lute, and the Italian had a version of the Vihuela, they simply called a Viola da mano. Anything you can play or anything written for six course lute can be played on the vihuela and vice versa. Take the tuning and action of the six course lute and transplant it on top of the vihuela shape body and there you go. Six course lute tuning is usually in G major and like a modern guitar with a capo on the third fret: GCFBflatDG..only the B flatis lowered one half step to A making is a minor third interval. That is called Renaissance lute tuning. If you put a cejilla on your guitar and lower the G string one half step you will be in the tessatura ( range) and tuning of vihuela and Ren lute. You can play lute music or vihuela music from the original tablature if you want. Comparing guitars to vihuela is tricky because the guitar was not really in existence as we know it now and during the time of the vihuela and ren lute the baroque guitar certainly had not developed. There was a time at the end of the 16th century when the guitar seemed to develop and the ren. lute and vihuela became obsolete. Music changed and keyboard instruments took the center of the ensemble, lutes changed and became 7, 9, 10 course beasts and then the baroque lute came into service with 13 courses. To complicate the story the "long necked lutes" Therobo and Chitarrone began to be used in early opera by Montiverdi at the end of the 16th century. The vihuela and ren. lute just did not have enough gas to compete with with harpsichords and bigger lutes. An aside: Theorbo and Chitarrone used single courses while the Archlute stayed a double coursed instrument. All those lutes have the same long necked structure, but the Theorbi and Chitarrone are single string and played with the finger nails. The double course lutes were played with finger tip flesh. So a comparison between guitar and vihuela is difficult to explain other than to say the vihuela really belongs in the lute family. The other difficulty is placing the four course guitar...ok that is a guitar shape body with a lute structure, but the tuning is also in G major like a modern guitar with a cejilla on the 3rd fret but you toss the bass E and the treble E and you have four courses tuned CFB flatD. In the day of the vihulea and ren lute 1500 to 1585 -- and a bit earlier vihuela music is reported as early as the mid 15th century-- one could take a vihuela and get rid of the G bass courses and the G treble string and you would have a Four course guitar, but who would want to play an instrument with space for extra strings? Right? So they made necks wide enough for six courses and that was a vihuela and then they made the four course width neck and it was commonly known as the four course guitar. A lot of lute composers also wrote for four course guitar. Look up Albert de Rippe he was the best although several of the vihuela composers also wrote for the four course, look up Valderabano and Mudarra. frSo basically the vihuela was really a lute format/structure instrument with a non bowl shaped body. There is a common narrative which is untrue that says the vihuela thrived on the Iberian peninsula because it was not oud shaped, it did not share the same staved bowl structure which lute and oud both have. Because the body is shaped differently than a lute, it has a different kind of sound. Imagine a flamenco guitar with a lute body, it would sound different...the shallow body imparts a lot of the character of the sound to the instrument, same with vihuela. During the time of the Reconquista in Spain the oud was still played and the flatter bodies of viola da mano and vihuela which were played in Italy and Spain simply sounded different than the lute and were more portable. The reason the oud was no longer played had less to do with anti Moorish politics than with the development of Western harmony which was not practical of fun on the oud. Vihuela music was developed out of Northern European church music, one could sit with the vihuela and arrange the four vocal voices in a church hymn and play them al lat once on vihuela..you can do the same with lute. Josquin des Pres was a Northern sacred composer who was popular in Spain and many vihuela works are basically intabulations or arrangements of his vocal of instrumental chuch music. Look him up and cross reference vihuela composers. The real thing the vihuela s know for are the bodies of work of the vihuelist composers who could really jam. Narvaez and Fuenllana were the baddest dudes who created wonderful music and it was called the art of variations. They would compose pieces which were often fantasies and elaborate variations on popular tunes. Narvaez probably had the best counterpoint writing of all of them, but Mudarra was no slouch. Fuenllana is lush and complex, but he never muddles or lets things get muddy even when he used four voices at once, which was often. His music is perhaps the most dense texturally. Anyway, if you would like to know more I'm happy to correspond with you or anyone interested in vihuela music. Juan Carlos Moreno, Toyohiko Satoh, Frank Wallace, Hopkinson Smith, Christopher Wilson ..and several others have all made great recordings on vihuela. Especially good is Fuenllana played by Moreno and Fran Wallace singing vihulea songs. Wilson plays wonderful Milan and Narvaez. "Hoppy" as he called recorded Mudarra songs with an important singer and Satoh is clean. Rolf Lislevand is great too. Best vihuela-ing to you- Next look up Juan Bermudo- Osuna 1555..'On playing the Vihuela' English version publish online by Lute Society of America. Bermudo touches on why equal temperament tuning is superior to tempered tunings...in 1550. Nothing new under the sun. S.F.
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