Lute mood

As According mood is mood of a lute called.

Frets

In the case of a six-string or six-course lute with the strings A dgh e 'a', the following section of the fingerboard with frets shows the tone supply:

a '	b '	H'	c ''	cis ''	d ''
e '	f '	fis'	G'	g sharp '	a '
H	c '	cis'	d '	dis'	e '
G	as	a	b	H	c '
d	it	e	f	f sharp	G
A.	B.	H	c	cis	d

In the Renaissance, G cfad 'g' and EA d fis he 'as well as other transpositions and moods are conceivable.

The frets of historical lutes were not metal rods firmly anchored in wood like on modern instruments, but - as the name suggests - pieces of strings tied around the fingerboard. These were movable and could therefore be adjusted as required. That is why the lute tuning is in principle somewhat variable. The same applies to viols and other instruments with a similarly built fingerboard.

The arrangement of the notes on the fingerboard shows that tuning of the lute with pure fourths and the frets attached according to the Pythagorean tuning is problematic because in some places impure octaves result. In the fingerboard shown above, for example, the octaves (d-sharp) and (g sharp-a-flat) are out of tune by a Pythagorean comma . If the frets are attached to the evenly tempered tuning (according to Vincenzo Galilei, see below) and the strings are tuned to fourths, the problem also arises, albeit to a lesser extent. A lute tuning with pure fourths therefore forces you to play that avoids the problematic notes. The same applies to a lute or gamba tuning that adapts to the mean- tone piano tuning common in the Renaissance . Such moods and playing styles are possible in principle and were also practiced in ensembles during the Renaissance.

Soon, however, an even twelve-step temperature of the sounds was sought, in which the problematic comma disappears and all intervals are multiples of the semitone the size of the twelfth octave. In 1533 Giovanni Lanfranco described this lute tuning and praised that the lute, in contrast to the mid-tone pianos, could be freely transposed. This shows that this mood was already widespread back then. The lutenist and Renaissance theorist Vincenzo Galilei - the father of Galileo Galilei - linked this lute mood in 1581 with the tone system of Aristoxenus , who was the first to use the semitone; Vincenzo Galilei used the good semitone approximation 18:17 (around 99 cents ) to construct the tuning on the lute . Shortly after 1585, Simon Stevin gave the first exact definition of lute tuning through proportions as powers of . Via Gioseffo Zarlino , who constructed the even lute tuning on the monochord in 1588 , Andreas Werckmeister later got to know this tuning and transferred it to pianos as a possible well-tempered tuning . ${\displaystyle {\sqrt[{12}]{2}}}$

There is an analogous situation on all stringed instruments with frets and strings tuned in fourths or fifths. Therefore, the whole group of lute instruments (various lutes, viols , guitars ) tends towards the even twelve-point scale. This usually applies to modern instruments with permanently installed metal frets and has a certain probability for historical instruments. Since such instruments already existed in the Middle Ages, the twelve-step tuning is probably much older in practice than the theory.

literature

• Lanfranco, Giovanni: Le scintelle di musica , Brescia 1533
• Galileo, Vincenzo: Dialogo della musica antica e della moderna , Florence 1581.
• Stevin, Simon: Van de Spiegheling der Singconst , ~ 1585
• Zarlino, Gioseffo: Sopplimenti musicali , Venice 1588
• Gerhard Söhne: Regular temperatures on the lute. In: Guitar & Laute 4, 1982, 1, pp. 98-101.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Reginald Smith Brindle: Meisterklasse, Part 3. In: Guitar & Laute 9, 1987, 3, pp. 45–48; here: p. 46