Corelli

I'm working hard on the baroque guitar at the moment because I have a couple of solo concerts coming up. Here's the first page of one of the pieces I will be playing (click it to see it bigger). It's by Santiago de Murcia and comes from his manuscript collection Passacalles y Obras de Guitarra (1732) in the British Library. Actually no, it's not by him: it's borrowed from Corelli. This is the start of Corelli's violin sonata op 5 no 8, beautifully reworked for guitar. The fancy ornaments are all SdM's own; but Corelli took a similar approach to his work, and there are original editions of the sonatas which purport to show Corelli's own, very extravagant, ornamentation.

By the way, the music is written in tablature. It's quite like modern guitar tablature, where the lines show the strings and the numbers show which fret to play, although here the lines are inverted, i.e. the lowest line is the highest sounding string. The capital letters in the first two bars are chord symbols, showing B major and E minor respectively with a barré at the seventh fret.

The facsimile that I'm working from was published by Editions Chanterelle in 1979. Unfortunately it doesn't appear on their website any longer, although they are still selling the facsimile of SdM's other book, Resumen de Acompañar la Parte Con La Guitarra (1714) for the reasonable price of €26.

While I'm in lute mode, there's a good interview with Hopkinson Smith here. A novel thought from him:

One would think that the organ would be the best instrument to perform polyphony because you can sustain everything, and that the lute would be the worst, because nothing can sustain. But, I think it’s just the opposite, -the organ is the worst instrument to play polyphony and the lute is the best. This is because with the lute one can really give life to every voice - one can breathe, adding a whole suggestive dimension to polyphony that is extremely difficult to do on the organ.