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Show LOCAL MUSIC 7 7 4 EAST 800 SOUTH • 539,1439 tSatfla Cruv The most extensive collection of handcrafted guitars Salt Lake has ever seen. SMOKEv•s RECORDS 1515 S. 15th East Salt Lake City, Utah 841 05 (801) 486-8709 10°/o off with your lAMA card Classical Corner ... by David Norton History & Repertoire XII: the Italian Baroque, Part I Just as the Renaissance Era was ushered in through the Florentine and Venetian master painters and sculptors, so too did the Baroque Era have its first stirrings in the Italian culture. A very basic reason for this artistic leadership was the powerful position and vast financial resources of the Catholic Church, headquartered in Rome. Driven by the forces of the Counterreformation, the Church sought to oppose Protestantism and regain the lost territories by overwhelming the world with a grandiose, emotional, and conquering purpose. The spirit of this movement found its expression in all of the arts connected with the Church; thus the music reflects the same tendencies found in the architecture and painting of the period. What the Pope had, the King of France wanted. What France had, Spain wanted, and so forth. But in a time of less than instantaneous communication, it would take several generations for an artistic "fad" to span all of Europe, by which time something new was on its way already. So, we have the interesting circumstance that John Dowland, English Renaissance musician par excellence, lived at almost the same time as Girolamo Frescobaldi, the master Italian Baroque musician. The gentle tinklings of the five-course guitar did not find much favor in Italian ears, their tastes running to the more robust resonances of the lute. But, in keeping with changing music compositional values, the Italian luthiers modified the tuning of the instruments. While the Northern European lutenists followed the French lead in developing an open D-minor tuning (see the July '93 column for specifics), in Italy they got really creative and came up with: the Archlute. Also known variously as chitarrones and theorbos, with subtle differences in body size, archlutes were primarily designed for use in vocal accompaniment, and are characterized by very long necks. How long? A typical1640s' archlute string length (bridge to nut) ran 90 em. Compare that to a modem classical guitar at 65-66 em; it's like adding four more frets at the first position. Just to further muddy the waters, the top two strings were tuned an octave low. So, in readily understandable guitar terms, imagine your third string (G) as your highest pitch, with the B and E dropped one octave. Of course, not all archlutes were tuned this way: some had just the first string lowered. Or just the second. Or neither. As if it weren't already complicated enough, there were added bass diapasons to deal with. The typical archlute had ten courses, some had 11 or 12. The official title of Biggest of 'Em All went to the monstrosity designed by one Johann Hieronymous Kapsberger: 19 courses! (That's 38 strings, folks). The fretted instrument scholar Arthur Ness pointed out that there are well over 15,000 extant pieces written for members of the lute family from 1507 to 1770. The downside to this equation is, you'd need 190 different tunings to play it all! The archlute is the proper continuo accompaniment for Monteverdi's operas, as well as most other 17th century opera, and not the harpsichord commonly used today. How do we know? Payroll records, which show conclusively that a standard early baroque orchestra employed four or five theorboists, and on rare occasions a single harpsichordist. So, why then did the theorbo lose its orchestral place? Economics: composers were quick to discover that one harpsichordist was often louder than all five archlutenists, and they could cut back production costs by paying the keyboard player twice what any one archlutenist earned, and save 60 percent on the deal anyway. In January, we'll discuss some of the composers who wrote music for this marvelous beastie. UCGS News: Student Recital, Tuesday, November 16, 7 p.m. Salt Lake City Main Library, 3rd Floor auditorium. Free Admission. 12 Intermountain Acoustic Musician, November 1993 |
