07Apr26

In the 50 pieces from the Thysius MS I put out a few days ago, I did not put out separately the pieces that I had included as quartet parts. In this edition, I kept the quartets as is, but I also listed the separate parts as separate pieces, as they were given in the MS. So now there are 92 pieces instead of 50. One result of this is that the pieces have had to be completely renumbered.

My choice of quartet parts was fairly arbitrary, as for most of the quartets, there were many versions of each part. My quartets should be regarded as a sample only. Further, the order of the parts is unclear. Normally, one would expect a contratenor part to be between the superius and the tenor, but as the instruments were apparently tuned, that could not work for any reasonable selection of instruments.

One author recommended that the bassus and the superius parts be interchanged (see Todd Lane “The Lute Quartets in the Thysius Lute Book”, in Journal of the Lute Society of America, #22 (1989), pp. 28-59). My preference was to leave the bassus and tenor parts as is and put the contratenor part on top of the superius part, but performers will have to make their own decisions about this.