#theorbo

Robert de Visée (1652-1725) - Prelude in A minor

Allegory of Music

Artist: Laurent de La Hyre (French, 1606–1656)

Date: 1649

Medium: Oil on canvas

Modern singer asks me to accompany her on theorbo for a set of two cantatas and a madrigal by Barbara Strozzi (17th century Italian). This is my jam.

Two pieces are in the natural hexachord (C major, A minor) and the third is in the flat hexachord (final of C with one flat in the key signature - that's F Hypoionian). She asks me to transpose the third piece up a minor third to Ab to fit her range. I tell her that would be too harmonically distant from the other two pieces and would sound bad in meantone temperament. I suggest she sing it in Bb.

This involves me transposing mentally. To do this I imagine my theorbo is in an adjacent hexachord.

My theorbo's fretted strings are tuned, low-to-high, ADGBEA, that is, in ascending fourths with a major third in the middle. G - B is UT - MI in the hard hexachord, so I think of this tuning as being harmonically centered there. In order to transpose this piece, I pretend its interior third is C - E, or UT - MI in the natural hexachord.

This yields a new tuning of DGCEAD. Fortunately, this is also the tuning of bass lute and viol and overlaps with that of the guitarron mexicana (ADGCEA). I consider these instruments as being centered in the natural hexachord, and group them mentally as such. Since I read from bass clef on these instruments, I can mentally "code switch" to this hexachordal tuning.

Unfortunately, I will have to play the theorbo normally for the other two pieces of the set. This means I will have to switch mental hexachords mid-set.

The bass lines aren't figured. I have to extrapolate harmonies and add figures myself.

Furthermore, the texts of the pieces are in Latin and Italian. I must draw from my memory of high school Latin class and the subsequent scraps I've picked up accompanying singers and analyzing sacred music.

Song of Yesteryear -- Ludovico Marchetti, 1892

Nice memory of how my bed looked during COVID lockdowns in 2021...