Meantone Temperaments on Lutes and Viols

David Dolata

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780253021236
• eBook ISBN: 9780253021465
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

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.

PART ONE

PRECEDENT

PART ONE INTRODUCTION

Myth’s stronghold on history is not easily weakened.

—Victor Coelho, Music and Science in the Age of Galileo

AND NOWHERE MORE THAN on the issue of temperaments on fretted instruments. The myth, of course, is that fretted instruments have always been restricted to equal temperament. One temperament and one temperament only, not even an “either/or.” But even “either/or” is antithetical to art, which welcomes multiple solutions to its challenges and diverse interpretations of its subject matter. In the Renaissance and Baroque eras as now, equal and unequal systems traveled together along parallel tracks, occasionally intersecting, but coexisting more or less peacefully outside the contentious realm of the professional theorists who oftentimes drew lines in the wet concrete, appropriating tuning systems as metaphors for a variety of worldviews regarding Nature and Art, God and Man, and so on, issues that went far beyond the concern of practical everyday musicians who were simply interested in making music sound as well as it could. It seems most likely that players of fretted instruments chose meantone or equal temperament according to their needs and abilities depending on the circumstances at hand.

That many of today’s finest players of fretted instruments arrange their frets in meantone temperaments whenever possible is indisputable. The following chapters aim to demonstrate that the same was true of our musical ancestors, particularly professional players and those who regularly performed with other instrumentalists, especially keyboard players, whom we know with certainty chose unequal temperaments for their instruments.¹ While the ability to tune in unequal temperaments may have been restricted to advanced players and professionals, as lutenist Paul O’Dette has suggested on many occasions, shouldn’t these be the players we emulate?² After all, who hopes to follow in the footsteps of a mediocre player? My purpose here is not to convince you that all our predecessors on fretted instruments set their frets in a meantone arrangement, but rather that enough of them did so to warrant our pursuit of this subject.

The array of evidence pointing to the use of unequal temperaments on fretted instruments in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries is multifaceted. It includes reports of countless well-known ensemble situations where lutenists or viol players joined keyboard players who presumably favored meantone temperaments, as well as scores specifying such ensembles. Historical treatises and commentaries offer bountiful evidence that fretted instruments were set in unequal temperaments. Lutes and viols also performed in prescribed consorts with wire-strung instruments whose metal frets were set in meantone and related temperaments; these instruments survive today. And, finally, there is iconography, a nascent field overflowing with promise and offering a great deal of fodder for future study.

Despite all this evidence, nothing, however, is more compelling than the fact that many of us use meantone temperaments on lutes and viols on a daily basis with very little effort. Just like our predecessors.

CHAPTER ONE

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 1594.¹ 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.²

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.³

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.⁴ 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.⁵

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.”⁶ 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.⁷ 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.”⁸ 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.⁹

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.”¹⁰ 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.”¹¹ 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.”¹² Penelope Gouk furthermore suggests, “The knowledge posse...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Diagrams
• List of Tables
• List of Audio Files
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One Precedent
• Part Two Theory
• Part Three Practice
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Hertz in Cleartune
• Appendix 2: Equal Temperament Offset Charts
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index