A substantial amount of early music for the guitar remains unknown to modern performers and audiences. In recent years, however, many fine musicologists, scholars, and performers of period instruments have provided a wealth of new materials--facsimile reprints, critical editions, translations of early treatises, and other resources--with which we may now begin to rediscover this music. Nevertheless, many may feel intimidated by the prospect of sorting through and learning to use such resources for the first time. For the uninitiated, just knowing where to start can be difficult.

Scholarly editions, which serve different purposes than performance editions, are not often designed with the modern guitarist in mind. For instance, Renaissance vihuela and lute tablatures are usually transcribed with the open first string as G, not E. Most are presented in double-staff notation, a medium that is superior for realizing counterpoint but unconventional as guitar notation. Furthermore, these editions sometimes give idealized, but not realistic, solutions for voicing, note duration, and other matters that need to be considered within the limitations of our instrument. Guitarists who try to play from these editions essentially are faced with the task of transcribing the transcription! This 176-page anthology is designed as a companion volume to The Renaissance Vihuela and Guitar in Sixteenth-Century Spain (MB21590) and includes representative selections from the publications and manuscripts of four important Spanish Baroque guitarists: Gaspar Sanz, Antonio de Santa Cruz, Francisco Guerau, and Santiago de Murcia. As well as being fun and entertaining music for all to enjoy, these collections are intended to help bridge the gap between scholarly editions and performance editions by providing a hands-on introduction to tablature transcription and to issues concerning historically informed performance on the modern guitar.

Preface

Plate 1. Five-course guitar attributed to Belchoir Dias (ca. 1590).
Photographs by Al Abrams: Abrams Photographics, Phoenix.

Plate 2. Alfabeto chart by Santiago de Murcia.
Image courtesy of Michael Lorimer.

Plate 3. Jean Daret (ca. 1613-1668): Portrait de l' artiste en guitariste.
Photograph by Bernard Terlay, courtesy of Musee Granet.

Plate 4. Theodoor Rombouts (ca. 1597-1637): The Singers.
Image courtesy of antiqueprints.com.

Plate 5. Fingering diagrams, from Instruccion de musica (1697) by Gaspar Sanz.
Shelf mark K1 k13, by permission of The British Library.

Plate 6. Frontispiece from Libro donde se veran pazacalles (ca. 1690)
by Antonio de Santa Cruz.

The Baroque Guitar in Spain and the New World As part of the Frank Koonce series of "music transcribed and adapted for modern guitar, with facsimiles of the original tablatures," this volume combines important historical and performance practice information with intelligent transcriptions of works by Caspar Sanz, Antonio de Santa Cruz, Francisco Gureau, and Santiago de Murcia. Koonce begins with a synopsis of his approach to adapting these works for the modern guitar, elaborating on various musical elements of special importance in this process. These include ornamentation, the use of campanelas, meter and tempo, syncopation (including the familiar hemiola), and rasguado techniques of the period. While many of the works are familiar in the standard repertoire, the totality of Koonce's approach makes this a compelling publication that should be in the library of every serious student of the classical guitar. -Michael Carenbaur, American String Teacher, November 2007