Oral transmission and the production of guitar tablature books in seventeenth-century Italy Visualizza ingrandito

Oral transmission and the production of guitar tablature books in seventeenth-century Italy

Autore Cory M. Gavito
Collana Recercare - Rivista per lo studio e la pratica della musica antica - Journal for the study and practice of early music
Dimensioni 17×24, pp. 230
Anno 2016
ISBN 9788870968569

This article invokes the modern concept of “fakebooks” — collections of standard popular songs with partial and easy-to-read musical notation — to contextualize the networks of songs widely published in the guitar-strumming tablatures of seventeenth-century Italy. While scholars, performers, and audiences are familiar with many of these tunes today (e.g. the Folia, Spagnoletta, Ruggiero, Passacaglia, Ciaccona, and Granduca), in this article the author begins by reporting on a few of the lesser-known songs of the strumming tablature books, whose concordances and genealogies have yet to be fully accounted for. Similar in design and function to today’s fakebooks, the tablature books served as pedagogical tools for learning to play the chord progressions of these well-known tunes on the fashionable five-course Spanish guitar. The notion that these songs made up a library of “standards” that seventeenth-century musicians should learn presents for us a window into both the performing and compositional habits of practicing musicians. Similar to the way in which jazz musicians equip themselves with an inventory of standard songs, I note how seventeenth-century musicians framed this repertory into a kind of intuitive language, presenting evidence that this musical knowledge was distributed well beyond the boundaries of guitar playing. Most significantly, this article elaborates on how the strumming tablature songs figure centrally within the avenues of musical transmission during the seventeenth century, documenting a space in which the “compositional” mode of the scripted page negotiates with the (often collaborative) modalities of oral practice and musical pedagogy. The author argues that this negotiation asks us to consider strategies of early modern songwriting more distributive and adjustable than the author-centric model so often assumed in compositional practice.