A Guide to Playing the Baroque Guitar

7. Idioms Unique to the Baroque Guitar

23 7 IDIOMS UNIQUE TO THE BAROQUE GUITAR “INvER SIONLESS” CHOR DS when chords are sounded on a guitar that is strung without basses, no strongly audible inversions are produced; the chords are heard as units of pure block harmony. Since the clarity and transparency of the chords allowed the words of solo songs to be easily heard and understood, this feature made the baroque guitar an ideal instrument for the accompaniment of “the new music” (Italian monody), and many of the early monody composers included alfabeto tablature, with or without a bass line for another instrument, in their collections. Example 7.1 presents the chart of alfabeto chords with a transcription beneath showing the actual voicing of each chord when played on a guitar strung without basses (stringing A). “Inversionless” chord voicing cannot be achieved on any other plucked instrument of the period, nor, of course, on the bass-rich modern guitar. Indeed, combined with the techniques for strumming the chords described in chapter 4, this idiom was one of the chief defining features of the baroque instrument. Example 7.1 THE BASICS 24 CA MPANEL AS The use of harp- or bell-like effects in scale passages is another important guitar idiom. There is no widespread term for this effect, which the Italians called campanelle, but the Spanish guitarist Gaspar Sanz, who espoused Italian technique, called it campanelas (little bells). It is performed by plucking each note of a scale (or other melodic passage) on a different course and employing as many open strings as possible, thus allowing each scale note to ring on longer than would otherwise be possible. The effect is similar to playing a rapid scale on the open strings of a harp without damping any of them; successive notes ring on and blend into the previous ones. Example 7.2 shows how this idiom looks on the page for a guitar using stringing A; it, too, cannot be achieved on a modern guitar. The long phrase marks in the transcription beneath the tablature are used to indicate that each of the separate notes under the mark blends into its neighbor. Example 7.2 25 IDIOMS UNIQUE TO THE BAROQUE GUITAR THE SELECTIvE PL AYING OF BOUR DONS Regardless of which of the three main stringing arrangements one uses, there will always be a few anomalies in the scale patterns. This occurs because there are only five courses available to the composer, and when the effect he wishes to achieve requires more than five, the result is the appearance of an octave leap. A technique that can eliminate most of these anomalies involves the selective playing of one or both strings in an octave-strung course. In order for this technique to work, the upper octave string of, say, the fourth course must be placed in the outer position—nearest the fifth course—and the lower octave string (the bourdon) nearest the first course. This placement of the upper octave is commonly found on many traditional types of guitar, including the jarana jarocha of Mexico, the tiple of Colombia, and the charango of Bolivia and other Latin American countries, as well as on the twelve-string guitar. The great violin and guitar maker Antonio Stradivari specifies this arrangement on one of his ca. 1700 design patterns. It is also described by guitarists Michel Corrette in 1763 and Paixão Ribeiro in 1789, and shown in a number of contemporary pictures. A course strung in this manner enables the guitarist to play either the upper and lower strings together or the upper string alone, depending upon the musical requirements of the scale passage, thus eliminating most octave-leap anomalies. The exercises in example 7.3 demonstrate this concept. They are for a guitar using stringing B (with a bourdon on the fourth course). An asterisk has been placed under the notes in the tablature where the music seems to indicate that the upper octave string and the bourdon should be played together. Otherwise, only the upper octave string should be sounded. Tuning charts found in two anonymous sources suggest that, occasionally, the third course was strung with an upper octave (g’) instead of unisons. Certain passages in the music of a number of composers, including Gaspar Sanz (1674) and Ludovico Roncalli (1692), imply the same. In order to string a guitar in this fashion, one would have needed either a smallish instrument with a...