A simple piece I may have unfairly rejected.
We have very little extant Renaissance guitar music written in England, but in The Osborn Commonplace Book there are a number of pages dedicated to the instrument. I have previously blogged most of them here (in revised format), and three more here.
A few days ago correspondent Martin Wall asked me if I had transcribed "What ys yt to love", and recommended watching the flamboyant version by Taro Takeuchi here. He is a very gifted player, and really knows how to spank a plank.
I had previously not bothered with making a transcription because I thought the piece was just arpeggiation of a simple chord sequence, but when I heard Taro I thought "it's not what you play it's how you play it." And so I'm posting my version here.
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| The first line of the MS, showing the original barring. I mostly followed Ward by splitting each bar (measure) into two. |
I must confess I (lazily) based this version on the transcription published in J M Ward's Sprightly and cheerful music, and then checked it against a facsimile of the original. I followed his barring, except in §D. Thanks to Martin's comments on a draft I think I now have the timings and beaming correct.
It's all based on the 8-bar chord sequence in, I think, 3/4 time
- Dm | A | Dm | A | Dm | C | Dm | A |
- which is repeated twice in variation,
- followed by a section [D] in 9/8 time (following the MS rather than Ward),
- concluding with a final section in 3/4, with a 2-bar scale passage.
The piece seems to stop rather abruptly, but that’s how it is in the MS. I imagine that the original was intended mainly as an aide memoire, like a jazz-man’s fake-book, and that the contemporary player would have improvised at will. So, there's a lot of scope to having fun, using your own ingenuity: plucking, strumming, varying the rhythm patterns, adding divisions (rapid runs of notes) and so on.
You can see and download a pdf of the transcription here.
Happy plonking!
