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| Adrian Le Roy. From Wikipedia (where else?) |
Having made my transcription I consulted Keith Calmes’ version for classical guitar and, if I thought he had a better treatment, I shamelessly copied it.
EGA1 writes on the subject of song entabulation in the 1500s :
“Since solo arrangements of songs did not need to take texts into consideration, it allowed guitarists to freely alter the forms of their vocal models”.
Bearing this in mind, I have tried to divide the piece into sections where it seems that a new strain begins, but these are of uneven length. The penultimate bars of each section are variations of the motif that I have discussed in "Solus cum sola", but predating that piece by about 50 years.
Most of the piece is set in G major, but sections C and D are mostly in C major. You will see that the main time signature is 2/4, but with incursions into 3/4. Calmes indicates that a bar of 3/4 should be played in the same period of time as a 2/4 bar.
Some single-bar motifs are repeated (5 = 12 = 25; 44 = 51), but subsequent bars are dissimilar.
If the entabulation follows the original, the song must have had quite an irregular structure. Perhaps it is best to regard this piece as a kind of fantasia. Since the title means something like "I feel the mood" (according to EGA1 affection meant the influence of a piece of music on the emotions), this seems not unreasonable.
As regards fingering, Le Roy indicated the unaccented notes, diads or triads by a small dot under them. Mostly they follow the rules described in my post “Authentic (?) Renaissance right-hand fingerings”, and summarised below, so I have not marked them on the transcript. Where Le Roy's indications differ from these rules, however, I have indicated them conventionally using the p - i - m - a system.
The rules:
(1) unaccented notes are played with i and (in chords or part chords) the other fingers;
(2) notes on the beat are accented and played using p or m;
(3) with runs of shorter notes, the 1st, 3rd, 5th etc are accented,
(4) dyads and chords are played with p, i, m, a as necessary.
You are free to download the transcription in the following formats:
Source
Je sens l'affection is transcribed from the original tablature in: Premier livre de tabulature de guiterre, contenant plusieurs chansons, fantasies, pavanes, gaillardes, almandes, branles, tant simples qu’autres le tout composé. par Adrian le Roy. Paris, 1551.
Facsimile online at: https://repository.royalholloway.ac.uk/items/36992e38-4a04-c705-affa-253d7b309c67/1/
(Permanent link: http://purl.org/rism/BI/1551/23)
