[Denemo-devel] Hello and Re: Lute version of pavan

[Edgar Aichinger]

Hello Richard and list,

> I attach a pdf of the Pavana Dolorosa extracted from the tablature
> transcribed by G. Furhmann
> It seems that (some of?) the low string(s) are not tuned as expected,
> since low D appears in C chords (etc.?).

Oh, I didn't even listen to the generated midi.

I haven't checked the Fuhrmann book for evidence but I think it was quite
common to use different tunings for the diapasons, or ask for lutes with 
different bass configuration, even in the same book! I think the player 
simply was expected to be able to cope with what was written, and which
instrument he had at hands. And, from my experience, you get used to that 
and develop a sense to memorize quickly which pitch a symbol means, and 
can adapt, even when sight-reading.

The standard tuning for extended basses on a lute in G would be:

                  7th (a)   8th (/a)   9th (//a)  10th (///a)
 7-course lute      D
 8-course lute      F         D
10-course lute      F         E          D          C

But obviously in this piece //a means C.

(BTW, Jeremiah, those lutes had the additional strings all over the fretboard, 
at the same scale, and quite many pieces from around 1600 require stopped 
bourdons. This Fuhrmann setting of the Pavana Dolorosa asks for a, /a, /c and 
//a, which seems to imply a 9-course instrument...


> Can anyone throw any light on this? Specifically the step from tab to
> lilypond must involve some specification of the tuning - who provides
> this?

There was no step from tab to lilypond - I loaded the Fuhrman.jtb source file
into the windows program Django, and after some trickery was able to export 
the midifile even with the demo version. I think at this step the 
misinterpretation happened, and I don't know Django well enough (it's a complex
program with lots of toolbars full of icons, windows style, I find it horribly
confusing) to know if it can manage different bass tunings within one file 
(which can contain many pieces).

Then I imported this midifile to Rosegarden, printed the score preview to the 
PDF I sent to you, and also exported to lilypond from there. I think I spent 
less than 1/2 hour on this, including installing the Django demo, so there was
no error-checking whatsoever ;)

> I will check in some extra Denemo goodies that I used to create this
> from the .ly file that Edgar sent me (unfortunately, no progress on
> lilypond import itself, it falls over on easy to skip things, like
> tenuto markings and slurs...)

> Richard

Edgar