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Friday 17 February 2023

Philippus Thomassinus (Filippo Tomassini): Ricorcata sopra la Canzone

  This "Ricorcata" is the fifth and longest of five pieces for Renaissance guitar in Concerto Vago ... , described in my post of 13 February 2023.  


The first two lines of "Ricortata..."
(The bar numbers were inserted by me as an aid to transcription.)
Facsimile at: Museo internazionale e Bibl. della musica, Bologna (I-Bc): V.156 


I am not sure exactly what the title means, possibly "Variations on (or explorations of) the song", but what song? One would have expected a song entabulation to have sections of the same length, but these are 22, 23 and 18 bars long. 

Nevertheless, its a pretty ingenious piece with up to three voices squashed into the 4-course instrument. It is a good puzzle to disentangle and represent the voices as they come and go, and you will have your own opinions on this. When you see how much variation there is in transcriptions of a single piece of tablature (by e.g. Le Roy) published by qualified musicians, I think you will agree that any reasonable interpretation is fair game. 

In general Concerto Vago... has a pretty low rate of errors, but whoever was making the plates must have been tired when cutting this, the last piece in the book. You will see from the notes at the bottom of the score that I had to make a number of editorial decisions.

Envoi

Finally, thanks again to Gilles T for drawing my attention to this book. My next task is to transcribe and arrange the greater number of lute pieces that start the book. I have done the first two, which are not half so interesting as "Ricorcata". But, since the tabs have fingering indications, I guess that the book was intended as a tutor. 

By the way, I have not reproduced the fingerings in the guitar pieces in the present transcriptions (mostly single dots, occasionally double) because they don't seem to mean the same as those that were conventional in the Renaissance: see my earlier post for a full description.


You can download a pdf file for Ricorcata here