John Griffiths - Vihuela - Lute - Guitar

INTRODUCTION

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The starting point for this collection is the advice given by Juan Bermudo in his Declaración de instrumentos musicales (1555) to aspiring vihuelists. It is a pathway towards learning the instrument based on the development of musical knowledge and good taste. Simply entitled De tañer vihuela (“On playing the vihuela”), the fourth book of Bermudo’s treatise is devoted to three main topics: description and tuning of the vihuela and related instruments, fret placement according to scientific principles, and the art of transcribing vocal polyphony into tablature. At the conclusion of the lengthy discussion of these topics, Bermudo proposes a simple and rational method for learning to play the vihuela. As a didactic system, his emphasis differs notably from that which has prevailed in musical pedagogy since at least the nineteenth century inasmuch as it is based on the simultaneous acquisition instrumental technique and musical knowledge. Bermudo’s beginners are guided towards achieving both aims by making arrangements of vocal polyphony. By doing this they will create for themselves a repertory that will help them develop the necessary technique, skill and good taste to go even further and invent their own works. It is therefore clear that vocal music was the basis of Bermudo’s aesthetic ideal and that his method is based on the desire to instil this model in the mind of the aspiring vihuelist. Perhaps for this reason, Bermudo’s didactic comments never refer directly to the mechanics of instrumental technique: he makes no mention of the different ways of right-hand plucking technique, left-hand finger placement, or any other element that we might associate with instrumental technique. He assumes that players will acquire these skills by as the natural by-product of the systematic learning process he proposes. Players wishing to learn specifics of sixteenth-century technique will not find help in Bermudo’s treatise but will instead have to rely on the instructions offered in the prefaces of the vihuela books by Mudarra, Valderrábano and Fuenllana, or in Venegas de Henestrosa’s keyboard manual, the Libro de cifra nueva (1557), that also provides some technical advice.

Bermudo’s method consists of seeking out and arranging vocal polyphony of high quality, playing this music with good style, and assimilating its compositional technique with the ultimate aim of eventually being able to create one’s own works. He proceeds from the simple to the difficult, starting with music in two voices, moving to homophonic works in three parts, and from there to imitative polyphony in four and more voices, and finally to the original fantasy of his readers. The composers invoked by Bermudo enjoyed a high level of fame and dissemination in Spain during the period: Juan Vásquez (c. 1500-c.1560), Josquin des Prez (c. 1460-1521), Cristóbal de Morales (c.1500-1553), and Nicolás Gombert (c. 1500-c. 1556), plus one other composer of whom no works survive, Baltasar Téllez. Bermudo affirms Vásquez’s fame as a composer of villancicos and praises Téllez for the same ability. He names Josquin as the founder of the imitative polyphonic style that was the dominant aesthetic of the period and his successors Morales, the most renowned Spaniard of the period, and the Franco-Flemish composer Gombert who was in Spain as master of Charles V’s Flemish Chapel from 1526 to 1540.

The method elaborated by Bermudo requires the vihuelist to gather polyphonic works and, using the techniques that the theorist explains with great detail, put them into tablature. These pieces, then, serve to learn the procedures employed by master composers in the creation of their works. Given, however, that my intention in this new book is to provide a historical anthology and show the way that Bermudo’s advice reflects the practice of his day, his advice needs to be applied somewhat differently. The present collection, therefore, gathers a series of works intabulated by Bermudo’s contemporaries –vihuelists Narváez, Mudarra, Valderrábano and Fuenllana– and presents them together with their polyphonic models in order to help the modern player perfect his/her stylistic knowledge of the repertory of the sixteenth century.

The approach I recommend is, therefore, to study the works initially in their polyphonic versions, just in the way that a sixteenth-century vihuelist would have done, playing each voice separately, getting to know it individually as well as understanding it in the context of the whole work. By doing this, the vihuelist will become familiar with the individual shape of each line, the particular places in which it takes a prominent role in the work, as well as those in which it recedes into the background. To make this easier, the imitative entries of each voice are indicated clearly in the scores given in the edition.

The passage in which Bermudo elaborates his didactic method comes at the end of his detailed instructions on the art of intabulating polyphonic music (Declaración, fol. 99v), the final part of chapter 71 entitled “Some advice to conclude the [discussion of] ciphering” (De ciertos avisos para la conclusión del cifrar). Without needing to discuss here of the process of translating mensural notation into tablature, it should be noted that the works included in this new anthology match the musical genres and styles indicated by Bermudo. The correlation between his treatise and the sixteenth-century vihuela books thus confirm Bermudo’s method to be a realistic reflection of contemporary instrumental practice.
 
The transcriptions

The versions of vocal polyphony in mensural notation are based on original sources, although they do not attempt to be critical transcriptions. In the few cases in which the tablature and the original vocal polyphony do not correspond exactly, I have modified the polyphonic transcription to provide a version of the polyphony work that hypothetically resembles the versions used by the vihuelists, based on the assumption that they often worked from variant versions. Based on the intabulation practices of sixteenth-century vihuelists, there are small discrepancies between the surviving vocal versions and the tablatures in most of the works. Most commonly, breves were broken into two semibreves, dotted notes were divided into two separate notes, passing notes or short diminutions were added, and cadences were ornamented. It has not been my intention here to provide transcriptions that reflect these modifications, except for musica ficta. The chromatic alterations made by the vihuelists in their tablatures are thus indicated above the respective notes in the transcriptions. In all the transcriptions, the rhythmic values of the original notation have been halved, and each two bars of the tablature make a single bar of the mensural transcriptions.

The transcriptions of the fantasias and other instrumental works are made as scores, with each voice on a separate staff, in order to facilitate study and analysis. In the same way as the vocal works, the principal themes of imitative episodes are enclosed in boxes, and vertical lines across the score indicate the principal section divisions of each work.

Two transcriptions are offered for each piece, for instruments tuned in G and E.  The transcriptions for vihuelas in G serve the practical needs of contemporary vihuelists rather than accord with Bermudo’s teaching, while the transcriptions in E serve the needs of modern guitarists.  In point of fact, the theorist recognises two ways of conceptualising the relationship between the original pitch of the polyphony and the fingerboard of the vihuela preferring –as he explains at the beginning of the Libro Quarto of the Declaración– to “change the instrument to suit the music” rather to “change the music to suit the instrument”. These phrases encapsulate the two different ways of accommodating vocal polyphony onto the vihuela, both conceptually and in practice. The principal practical difference that results from employing one way rather than the other has to do with the placement of vihuela’s frets as required by the various sixteenth-century systems of unequal temperament. Given that the present collection is based on intabulations made by vihuelists in the sixteenth century rather than newly intabulated works, the principal disadvantage of the system employed here is that the modern transcriptions do not always present the works in their original pitch and tonality. Even though the transcriptions here have been made with the modern player in mind, it is worth understanding Bermudo’s reasoning:
    That which I have sought to achieve in all my books is firstly to set down and systematise that which practical musicians do, and afterwards if there is anything new, explain it for those who may wish to go further: this is what I shall do in the matter of the vihuela. Inquisitive players of the vihuela choose one of two practices in this respect: either they change the music to suit the instrument, or they change the instrument to suit the music. Let it be clear: it is a single instrument and it notes are fixed, and should the music be out of key when responding to a choir, or for some other reason that vihuelists might have, they change the music. Thus, there are some vihuela players who always think of the vihuela as being in a fixed tuning, and if the music should not agree with their conception of the instrument, because it goes beyond the range of the frets, they transpose the music so that it can be comfortably played. This way of playing the vihuela used to be more common than it is now and there were players with great facility even if they were not as wise as those who these days use many vihuelas. I deal with this subject following this present overview in chapter eighty-two. Those who did not know how to shift their frets used this way of intabulating on the vihuela and for their needs it was good. These days there are musicians who, not content with changing the music to suit the vihuela prefer to leave it as they find it and change the vihuela by not always imagining the sixth course to be one pitch, but pretend to raise or lower it according to the music. They imagine, then, the lowest note of the vihuela sometimes to be G, other times A, and thus on all of the seven different notes, and even sometimes even on chromatic semitones. This is what good players do, and you will encounter it in both Spanish and foreign tablatures.

Leaving aside the implications regarding temperament, the main point for preferring to change either the instrument or the music has to do with finding the best way of fitting polyphonic works onto the vihuela. In the explanations that follow the cited passage, Bermudo advises that this depends first of all on the range of the work. In order to move the instrument rather than the music, he gives some general rules to follow in order that the music fits between the open sixth course and the seventh fret on the first, at the same time trying to get maximum use of the open strings. If in starting to make an intabulation, the vihuelist accustomed to thinking on vihuela común in G, realising that a work will not fit comfortably on his instrument, has the option of transposing the music or imagining the vihuela to be tuned to different notes. Bermudo’s preference is to imagine the vihuela in a different tuning rather than to transpose the music, vihuelas imagined in the player’s mind as tuned in A, B, C, D, E or F.

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Study
Musicians of Bermudo’s time intabulated vocal polyphony for two principal reasons: in order to be able to play works already known to them for their own enjoyment, or in order to get to know music that was new or unknown. Whether for pleasure or for didactic reasons, it was through the process of intabulating that they became aware of the compositional techniques of the most renowned composers of their age. For the majority of modern vihuelists, the situation is the reverse. The printed vihuela books of the sixteenth century contain some almost 700 works already in tablature and almost 60% of them are arrangements of vocal polyphony. The proposal here is that vihuelists today enter further into the world of vocal polyphony and the musical style of the period –represented by the works presented here– firstly through a detailed study of the original polyphony, and then by applying this enhanced understanding to the solo intabulations, profiling each of the voices, emphasising imitative thematic entries, allowing less important voices to recede into the background, and shaping each voice according to its implicit expressiveness.

This anthology has been conceived to permit its use in several different situations. The transcriptions allow the study of each voice at a time, phrase by phrase, or imitation by imitation. They should help the vihuelist to develop a capacity to unravel the polyphonic texture of any work notated in tablature, whether an intabulation or an original composition. The transcriptions are also designed so that they can be used in ensemble, with each voice played on a separate instrument. Playing in ensemble is a learning experience that gives musicians the opportunity to get to know each voice of the works in their polyphonic context and permits them to refine their appreciation of the subtleties of the music, and the role of each voice at any given moment within each work.