Luogo e data di registrazione		Plenarsaal, München (Germania) - 11/13 febbraio 1975
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Executive Producer		Dr. Andreas Holschneider
	Recording Producer		Heinz Wildhagen
	Balance Engineer		Heinz Wildhagen
	Prima Edizione LP		ARCHIV - 2533 1302 - (1 LP - durata 45' 06") - (p) 1975 - Analogico
	Prima Edizione CD		ARCHIV - 447 727-2 - (4 CD's - durata 71' 05"; 73' 47"; 68' 14" & 62' 37" - [CD3 20-29; CD4 1-11]) - (c) 1995 - ADD
	Cover		Jan Miense Molenaer "Musizierende Gesellschaft" - Photo: Archiv für Kunst und Geschichte, Berlin
	Note		-

 

A great deal of 16th-century music, in a historically valid interpretation, may be performed in various different ways, all possessing the same claim to authenticity. Lute music of the period, however, may be assumed to have sounded almost exactly the same then as it does in modern performances on the lute. This is because the music has come down to us in the form of notation known as tablature, which shows how the player is to produce the required notes, together with ornaments, divisions (instances of reduction to shorter note values), and later also “graces” (mordents, trills etc.). Nevertheless we do not hear this music as the composer’s contemporaries heard it, because our hearing is differently conditioned. For example, harmonic audacities of a past era now seem absolutely a matter of course, since they have so often been imitated in the meantime. In fact music of the past can create its full effect only if its listeners bear in mind, as far as possible, the historical and stylistic context in which it was composed. Lute pieces were either printed or circulated only in manuscript copies, depending on whether they were intended for the public or for the personal use of the person possessing the manuscript. They were written in tablature, which shows not the note to be heard but the string required to produce it and the fret on the fingerboard at which the string is to be stopped. The rhythm is indicated by other signs. The different kinds of tablature employed have provided the basis for dividing the pieces in this recording into two groups: The Nuremberg musician Hans Newsidler, Sebastian Ochsenkhun who also came from Nuremberg but was later employed in the Palatinate, Hans Judenkünig who worked in Vienna and the East Prussian Matthaus Waissel - he was the last to do so - used the system of “German lute tablature” in which every note playable on the instrument had a sign (a number or letter) of its own. The pieces by lutenists working in Belgium and the Netherlands - Antwerp, Utrecht, Leiden, Amsterdam - Emanuel Adriaenssen, Gregorio Howet, Joachim van den Hove, Nicolas Vallet, Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck - and the Landgrave Moritz of Hesse who was influenced from England, employed “French tablature”. This system made use of letters on a stave of six lines corresponding to the six original strings of the lute, with letters showing an open string (= a) or the fret at which a string was to be stopped (b = 1st fret; c = 2nd fret etc.) When lower strings were used the letters were placed below the lines, although Vallet used a sevenline stave from the outset. This possibility of indicating by the method of notation the downward extension of the lute’s compass led to the abandonment of German tablature. It was not only in the system of notation used that the pieces by German and by Netherlands lutenists differed. It should also be mentioned that between the tablature publications of Judenkünig. Ochsenkhun and Newsidler on one hand, and those of Vallet and van den Hove on the other there was an interval of almost a century, during which both musical taste and instrumental technique naturally changed and developed. Nevertheless the three basically different forms of lute music retained their individual characteristics throughout the whole period covered by this recording. There are fundamental differences between a) arrangements and transcriptions of vocal partsongs (intavolatura), b) independent compositions, and c) arrangements of dances and dance tunes. This division into three categories is to be found - sometimes in a different order - in the printed and manuscript copies of the period, as this made it easy to locate particular pieces. Dances by German lutenists are in the form which was then customary: the “Tanz” (dance) proper in duple time, performed in measured steps, is followed by a “Nachtanz” (after-dance: Gassenhauer, Proporz, Tripla) with the same melody in triple time. In accordance with the manner in which the piece was danced this after-dance was also known as the “Hupfauf” (hop-up) or the “Sprung” (leap). Titles refer to melodic or technical features of the dance, or are simply descriptive of the type of dance. “Der Juden Tantz” requires the accompanying strings to be re-tuned to provide a drone (tonic note with fifth), in order to underline the caricature suggested by the melody, based on a single theme; “Welscher tantz Wascha mesa” is probably a distorted version of the Italian word “Passamezzo”, measured dance; in “Der gestraifft Danntz” the player rubs his thumbs across all the strings as on a harp; the “Hoff dantz” refers to the skilful and artistic way in which melodies were decorated; “Deudtscher Tantz” is a general term, as opposed to the specific expression “Polnische Tänze”, used in the same lute book. The Netherlands lutenists preferred dances which had originated in Latin countries and which around 1600 dispensed with the combined form of dance and after-dance. The titles indicate the tempi and steps required: Courante, Branle, Galliarde, Pavane etc. It is noteworthy that in these dance arrangements the emphasis placed on the strong beat of each bar in pieces actually meant for dancing by means of chords or the use of open bass strings gives place to more artistic writing: the melody is contrasted by independent parts in contrary motion to the upper voice, or imitating it. Other features of arrangements are also evident in the works of the German lutenists: formal strength and frequently diminishing variation of the preceding section of the melody in repetitions. The use of contrapuntal construction and the independence given to middle and under parts, however, point to the influence of the free forms Fantasia and Prelude. These enabled the lutenist to shine with his technical skill in performance, and to demonstrate his command of the more demanding techniques of composition. Here too, comparison between somewhat similar pieces by Newsidler and Waissel and those of Howet, van den Hove and above all Adriaenssen shows how the stylistic media of these forms - contrapuntal elaboration, rapid running figures, changes of register, excursions into remote and technically difficult tonalities, construction based on a single theme - were being employed ever more skilfully and to greater purpose. In contrast to these original compositions by lutenists there are the adaptations (“intavolatura”) of sacred and secular vocal music, i. e. transcriptions for the lute of existing compositions, by which means a single musician could play well-known and popular compositions intended for a number of singers. The lutenist had to transcribe the original work as faithfully as possible, although he was influenced by such technical limitations of the lute as its restricted range, the difficulty of stretching certain intervals on the fingerboard, and the fact that notes quickly die away. It is remarkable how successfully lutenists reproduced complex contrapuntal pieces by skilfully chosen tonalities and changes of position, cross stoppings and the omission of octave doublings and subsidiary parts, and how they overcame the problem of notes dying away quickly by adding ornamental cadences, running figures and decorations of the melody, to create what are to all intents and purposes lute pieces in their own right, without destroying the original compositions. When listening to these adaptations it should be borne in mind that they were intended for a particular circle of listeners, who knew the originals. Today we would believe some of these pieces, such as Judenkünig’s “Ellend bringt peyn” and Vallet’s “Slaep, soete, slaep”, but for their titles, to be free lute compositions or dances, since they make use of similar stylistic features, but in fact they are transcriptions of existing works whose composers are known. For example the intavolatura of “Innsbruck, ich muss dich lassen” is based on the well-known song by H. Isaac. The two psalm settings of Sweelinck are unusual in that - as with a dance - he took over melodies and arranged them in several parts (they are from L. Bourgeois, De Psalmen Davids..., Leiden 1574). They have come down to us in a manuscript which details the repertoire of a town musical circle, to which Sweelinck belonged, and gives one more proof of the fact that in the 16th/17th century lute playing was cultivated in all classes of society. Dieter Klöckner Translator: John Coombs