Output details

Flying Horse - Music from the ML Lutebook

Research content/process:

The research question addressed in this project was the significance and status of seventeenth-century English sources influenced by performing traditions, as opposed to musical texts approved by or associated with composers. The ML Lute Book shows a leading player of Prince Henry’s musical household revealing to a student the processes of updating Golden Age Elizabethan composers by moving the emphasis from counterpoint and divisions, to a profusion of left hand ornaments (on almost every note) that has led to it being dismissed as a trustworthy source by modern scholars and performers. The practical method involved Kenny re-inhabiting the physical practices of the player, as revealed in the lute tablature, over several months, and then re-calibrating expectations of how much and what kind of ornamentation enhances the communicative and affective properties of the music. Questions arising from physical practice (tablature) as opposed to figurative music notation (staff notation) found a better theoretical framework in archaeology (Carsten, Hugh-Jones and Julian Thomas) than music or textual history. Putting archaeological work into a musical context established a framework for investigating musical history in physical terms, similarly to how musicologists (Le Guin) use physicality to revisit the musical canon. It also allows a hugely significant repertoire that is obscured in lute tablature to be discussed in terms accessible to a wider community than lute scholars alone. The research was presented at the American Musicological Society Annual Meeting in Indianapolis in November 2010, and in ‘Revealing their hand: lute tablatures in early seventeenth century England’, Renaissance Studies 26 (2012): 112-137 (included in the accompanying portfolio). The significance for performers lies in the evidence of highly individualised practice based on the physical and aesthetic preoccupations of the player, as opposed to the uniformity of performance practice encouraged by going back to one 'original' textual source.