Notes on Piccinini Intavolatura di Liuto, v. 1
I intabulated this edition of Piccinini's Libro Primo from a rather
poor facsimile copy. It was not too hard, though, to make an educated
guess about what Piccinini intended. Piccinini has a quite
extensive errata section at the end of his volume. I accepted his
corrections without comment in my edition. If you see an
un-annotated discrepancy between the source and my edition, check Piccinini's errata sheet before
counting it as an error. There were, however, about an equal
number of errors that Piccinini did not list. These have also
been noted and corrected.
Piccinini did not put time signatures at the beginning of his pieces.
I have provided what I think are reasonable time signatures,
using the more modern (and more specific) type of time signature.
Mostly, his measures are all equal to each other. in a very
few cases, I have split double-length measures, using ties as necessary.
Piccinini often used the lower diapasons, especially the 14th course,
to fill in missing chromatic steps. Evidently his lutes did not
have the capacity to finger the 7th and 8th courses. If your lute
can finger one or both of these courses, you may find it easier to use
these courses instead of retuning the lower ones.
Although Piccinini did not write in ornaments, he liberally used slurs
and two other fingering notations. One is the classic dot under
the note to indicate use of the index finger. The other is a dot over
a note, a tenuto mark that indicates that the note is held while other
notes are played. Unlike Capirola, he does not indicate when the
tenuto ends, but it's not hard to figure this out. The Fronimo
software I used to intabulate Libro Primo does not have a dot over a
note as an option, so in its place I have substituted a U-shaped
ornament mark under and slightly to the right of the held note, which
you might think of as a tiny slur or tie. I thought of putting in
actual ties, but did not want to impose my own interpretation of when
the held notes end.
As the quality of the source is poor, there are probably missing
fingering dots of both kinds, and in some cases a random dot on the
page could masquerade as a fingering notation, so there could be false
positives and false negatives. I tried to do what was reasonable,
but there were so many of these that I did not want to clutter up the
document with notations for all of them. At times, Piccinini
seems very generous with his notations; at other times, there are very
few. Again, the player has to do what's reasonable.
Have fun with this wonderful music!
--Sarge