[SCA-Dance] Help finding tenor line
gaita@btinternet.com
chris at gaita.co.uk
Wed Sep 24 14:38:26 EDT 2008
Hi
The La Spagna tenor is one of the three given by Cornazano
(called 'Il Re de Spagna' and is 23 doubles in length). This has been
used by many composers for arrangements but it would appear that
a 'tenor' is a somewhat flexible idea. No period arrangement I have
seen uses the tenor exactly - various repeated notes in the Cornazano
version are often left out, the cadences get ornamented etc. It also
seems that musicians when improvising around the tenor would adjust
the arrangement to the length of the dance. In such a way you can
arrange pretty much all the bassadanzas to some variation of the
three Cornazano tenors.
Also worth noting there is a very similar tenor for a basse dance in
the Brussels ms - 'Castille la nouvelle' - but this moves at half the
speed of the bassadanza version. This can be seen at the very useful
website www.pbm.com/~lindahl/almond/basse/basse.html#46
I can send you a Noteworthy file of the tenor as it appears in
Cornazano(or I could probably sort out a PDF).
Chris Elmes
Gaita Medieval Music
www.gaita.co.uk
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