Ricardo -> RE: Basic theory question (Sep. 11 2024 0:48:05)
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As to Ricardo's point, the Renaissance guitarists were mostly working in counterpoint and voice-leading, so no, many vertical sonorities in vihuela and 5-course guitar ARE NOT Chords. That is not the way they thought of them and anything that LOOKS like a chord is probably just an isolated sonority. However, Amat publishes his work on chords in 1596 (some argue 1586 but he would have been very young). The Renaissance composers must have figured out how to abstract vertical sonorities to arrive at chords but it was the folk/popular musicians who seem to have developed the strummed style. So there is no documentary evidence before Amat of an understanding of chords as distinct and autonomous sonorities, although we can infer that somebody figured it out. Beautiful example of Renaissance “gate keeping” I was describing. Because these guys were not “thinking about chords” (a subjective hypothesis –without a Time Machine nobody has a right to assume what people were thinking or not, it is all only based on PUBLISHED TREATISES evidence only, of which is limited vs actual music happening at the time), we are therefore PROHIBITED from using a fair translation of concept with a different discipline’s terminology. And just because someone doesn’t know the “conventional name for a chord”, does not negate two things: their occurrence as “vertical sonorities” of different pitches and FUNCTION, within the person’s music. There are details such as a tritone appearing, and the way a chord is plucked on a vihuela, the offensive note appears off set by timing….yet as sustained voices they are permitted to be heard TOGETHER. While this staggering effect is achieved by literally copying the vocal parts as best possible (in tabulation), for the practical reasons I described earlier (stretching the hand to allow vocal parts to cross on adjacent strings is nonsensical), the vertical creation in time becomes what we can translate as “triad”. Just because the violence of a STRUM is not experienced the same as a careful plucking of certain strings, does not require a military police style intervention to the concept. Even when doing RASGUEADO on a big chord in flamenco, it is often the case the sound is achieve by staggered voices heard SEPARATELY, yet ring together later in time. (Think Tangos i-a-i where i up only gets strings 1,2,3, then ring gets strings in the middle 4 3, maybe 2, then the index down snaps into the basses 5 and 4, like that cascade of voices in Queen bohemian rhapsody “magnificoooooo”., the same concept of vocal polyphony). So the compromise required in MANY cases I see with Vihuela is that the vertical concept of MARCHING BLOCK CHORDS violating voicing rules etc. is produced due to practicality of fingering all the voices. That is a huge percentage of the intabulations I look at with only special fugal canon type sections that are NOT doing block chords. I don’t give a ratt but that “back then nobody thought that way”, the concept was a result of the practical compromise. Bermudo gluing frets down is only reinforcing the concept that, call em what you want, “chords” were being used to reduce or represent the “choir” on the fingerboard. And this just with the published “orthodox” educated practice. Who the hell knows what was going on in popular culture…likely a shyte ton of chords going on as well. I encountered in my research, entire towns that had popular culture of singing vocal harmony or improvising polyphony (uneducated versions compared to choir singers trained in church), and would accompany themselves with instruments…implying that the known publications were not exclusive works for the trained musician, but could have been even “average joe” training tools, in hopes they stop parallel 5th making (LOL). Probably why the first guitar Fantasia (Mudarra) gets included in the collection, cuz average joe had the ukulele, excuse me “guitarra”, and deserved to know how fugues work as well. The Amat thing you mention appear only a few decades later (1590s) and once again, only reinforces the obvious situation going on already. I see it as an inevitable result of TRYING to follow the rules, however, not to deliberately avoid it, as the gate keepers make it sound.
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