EXPLANATION OF THE TABLATURE AND MODE OF INTERPRETATION EMPLOYED. THE tablature or literal form of notation in which the Skene MS. is written, although it has been in disuse for many years, was formerly the customary and established method of noting music for instruments of the Lute species, besides being sometimes adapted for the Viol. The notes are expressed by the letters a, b, c, &c. These letters, however, are not used like ordinary musical characters to denote the intervals of the diatonic scale or gamut, but the semitones of the chromatic scale, ascending in regular progression from each of the open strings of the instrument. The strings are indicated by the different lines of the stave, and above each of the lines is placed the alphabetical character by which the particular note is represented. A, is always used to signify the open string; b, the semitone above that; c, the semitone above that again, and so on. Indeed, as the necks of these instruments were fretted by small strings tied round them at distances denoting a semitonic interval, and the frets were marked b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, &c., these characters were just the representatives of the frets. The duration of the sounds is expressed by minims, crotchets, quavers, &c., placed above the stave, and immediately over the letter or letters which they are intended to affect; and each of the musical notes is held to apply to the letters immediately following, making them of the same length with the first, until some new note occurs. It will be observed, that, although the stave of the Skene MS. has only four lines, the mandora or mandour, a kind of small lute, for which it was written, must have had at least five strings. This appears from the 212 EXPLANATION OF THE TABLATURE, &c. circumstance that the letters occasionally go under the fourth line, in all which cases they refer to a string of the instrument lower than the fourth. See Hawkins's Hist. vol. iii. p. 163. A necessary consequence of writing music in tablature is, that the relations of the sounds expressed by the letters must vary according to the accordatura or tuning of the instrument, which was not always the same; and in the Skene MS. two different adjustments of this nature appear to have been employed. One of these adjustments was equivalent to the following,and the expression of its scale in letters would be as below: o ΟΣ id The other was what was called in the MS. the "Old Tune" (accordatura) of the Lute,-in common notation as follows,and in tablature thus: b i d In these diagrams the modern notes above, on the stave of five lines, represent the equivalents of the letters written below on the stave of four lines, as in the Skene MS. The o marks the position of the open strings. Speaking of the specimens of French airs of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which La Borde has given in his "Essai," Dr Burney observes" When we see how they are tricked up by the Editor with a Hist. vol. iii. p. 595. EXPLANATION OF THE TABLATURE, &c. 213 all the chromatic learning of modern times in the accompaniment and taste, in the appoggiaturas and embellishments, it destroys all the reverence and respect which, in their native simple garb, they would have inspired. This want of fidelity in copying throws a doubt upon all the manuscripts and representations of ancient things that come from France. In the history of an art, nothing can ascertain its state and progress at different periods of its cultivation, or satisfy a careful enquirer, but the most genuine fac-similes." Impressed with the justness of this principle, and the correctness of the views here expressed, although it would have been an easy task to have furnished the airs of the Skene MS. with piano-forte accompaniments, and even some of them with words, and thus to have adapted them to popular use, it was felt that this could not be done without encroaching upon that authenticity and fidelity of translation which the public were entitled to expect in a work of this nature, and which would alone enable them to point to these airs as the ancient music of Scotland without any intermixture of modern ideas. For this reason, it was deemed advisable to adopt as strict a mode of interpretation as practicable; representing the notes in modern characters, exactly as they appear on the face of the MS. Nor is it any exception from this rule, that the semibreves and minims should be exchanged for crotchets and quavers, the same proportion being preserved throughout, and the last mentioned symbols in modern notation being equivalent to the two former in that of an older date. It should be mentioned, however, that the ignorance of rhythm which prevailed at the time when the MS. was written having occasioned some irregularities in that part of the transcription, the translator has some a We are afraid that even M. Michel's elegant work, the "Chansons du Chatelain de Coucy," however satisfying in a literary point of view, will scarcely, in so far as the music is concerned, redeem his countrymen from the slur which Dr Burney has here cast upon them, (somewhat more sweepingly, perhaps, than was fully warranted.) But the late M. Perne, by whom the airs were deciphered, and who was a composer of great learning, from certain admissions which he has made, (p. 148,) leads us to infer that he had adjusted the melody to the modern scale; while his accompaniments are not only modern in their style, but artificial, chromatic, and not accommodated so much to the character of the melodies as to the taste of the present day. 214 EXPLANATION OF THE TABLATURE, &c. times required to exercise his judgment with respect to the duration of the particular sounds; as well as the division of the series of these by means of bars, so as to distinguish the different phrases of the melody.a It was also thought right to prefix to the different airs the measure of the time, and the signature of the apparent key, neither of which has been done in the original. To give the precise pitch upon which the melodies are set has not been attempted, as we have no certain knowledge of the diapason or concert-pitch of the age when the MS. was written. And this can be of little consequence, as the process of transposition would still have been necessary with most of the airs, from their having been removed from their original keys, on being transferred to the MS., in order to accommodate them to the instrument for which they are there arranged. a No liberty has ever been taken in substituting one note for another, except in a few cases where a clerical error in the MS. has been corrected; and when these occur, the nature of the mistake has been explained at the foot of the page. |