School of Languages and Linguistics - Research Publications
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 6 of 6
-
ItemAplicación de un método retórico-arquitectónico al análisis de la fantasía renacentista(Wanceulen, 2024)Analysis is a tool that provides answers to our questions about music. When we ask the same question numerous times, the same tool can serve us. When we separate the tool from the music being analysed, that tool-when theorised-becomes a methodology. The objects I want to analyse are Renaissance fantasies that have lacked a methodology. To rectify this lack, one has to start from the beginning. The central question that interests me is not of the superficial but of the most difficult to answer: what is it that gives fantasias their coherence, what is it that makes them music to contemplate and consume, what is it that gives them their meaning, their form, or their being? We know that the instrumental fantasia was revered at the time as music of high status, comparable to the motet and madrigal in the vocal repertoire, but without formal pattern, or literary explanations of its structure. The absence is frustrating because it inhibits the usual practice in historical musicology of seeking convergence between the works and the corresponding theoretical writings. Given this situation, my work is based on two strategies: one by reading a broader literary base of Renaissance literature, and the other by applying a new system of modern analysis based - as far as possible - on historical principles and ideas. This analytical tool focuses on two areas: architecture and rhetoric. These are concepts that provide fundamental principles for looking at the dimensions of space and time as applied to music. By building on them, it is possible to design analytical models that can be validated in their own period but outside the realm of music theory. In this presentation my aim is to show how such a theory can be applied not only to instrumental fantasies, but also to vocal polyphony and validated by empirical observation.
-
ItemKeyboard Tablatures and Imaginary Instrumental Interchange in the Sixteenth Century(MDW Press, 2024)The invention and widespread dissemination of music in tablature was one of the great novelties and a key factor in the proliferation of solo instrumental music during the sixteenth century. An alternative to mensural notation, tablature offered systems of writing music better suited to polyphonic instruments, particularly keyboards and plucked strings such as lute, guitar, and vihuela. Tablatures emerged in a variety of forms that used the letters, numbers and conventional mensural symbols, and many aspects were shared between the notations devised for keyboards and plucked strings. Although we recognise specific idiomatic styles associated with individual instrument types, there is also a significant amount of music that shares common features and that can be performed on diverse instruments. This was recognised by Spanish musicians such as Luis Venegas de Henestrosa whose tablature published in 1557 was advertised as being for ‘tecla, harpa y vihuela’. This paper explores the idea of interchangeability associated with such tablatures, and a range of issues extending from the particularities of the Venegas book and its emulation by Cabezón in 1578, beyond national borders to consider the nature of tablature across notation styles, and instrumental practice in distinct regions of Europe.
-
ItemBembo to Barbetta: Lutes, Lutenists and Luthiers in Cinquecento Padua(Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2023)
-
ItemNo Preview AvailableCifras y letras: el significado de las tablaturas(Reichenberger, 2023)Until around 1750, more than 70,000 musical works are preserved in alternative notations to the conventional mensural. These tablatures preserve music for more than forty instruments, including the human voice. For the past almost ten years, we have conducted a research project on this alternative notation, in all its variants, from the widely accepted mainstream forms to the more idiosyncratic and little-used experiments. The extensive study has revealed what all these notations have in common. In this paper we explore the nature of tablature, the essence of its graphic system, the contemporary challenges to renewing the associated terminology, the marginalisation of tablature music from our cultural heritage, and the historiographical problems produced by the near-total exclusion of such a large repertoire from musicological thinking. What we have learned through this project is that tablature is much more than a simple notation for "playing by numbers," it is an alternative way of thinking about music and transmitting it. We have also learned the special functions of tablature, what could be written in tablature that was impossible in conventional notation, and the roles played by these tablatures in the social fabric of music, from their use as scores to facilitating the popular transmission of elite repertoires.
-
ItemVihuela(Brepols, 2023-02-28)This book collates 100 exhibits with accompanying essays as an imaginary museum dedicated to the musical cultures of Renaissance Europe, at home and in its global horizons.
-
ItemHistorical Pedagogy and the Lute: Education to Match Aspirations(Deutsche Lautengesellschaft and Lute Society of America, 2021-11-11)Explores the history of institutional lute learning in Europe since 1900; explores the nineteenth-century pedagogy used in conservatorium and university practical tuition and its limitations for teaching early music, and presents an alternate pedagogical methodology based on sixteenth-century Spanish theorist Juan Bermudo.