23Jun20: Completed work on Francesco Spinacino Intabulatura de Lauto, v.1 (1507). This is apparently the earliest printed lute book, printed by Ottoviano Petrucci, also the publisher of Odhecaton. Despite its early provenance, the music is quite sophisticated, and the printing is very clear and relatively error free. The pieces are generally of medium difficulty, with only a few easy and a few challenging items. The book contains many well put together intabulations of songs from Odhecaton, hardly surprising since they share the same publisher. It also contains 5 lute duets, which are rather a nightmare to edit, containing many gratuitous dissonances. I have not tried to correct these, and I present them in all their original ugliness. Perhaps I will take on the project of attempting to make these playable in the future, or maybe someone else has taken on or will take on this burden, in which case I could use the help. There has been a fronimo encoding of these pieces and of those in v.2 that has been hanging around for over 20 years. I have never been able to obtain permission to use these files, so I have decided to bite the bullet and work directly from the source facsimiles without consulting those files, since this is one of the most important lute books, and it’s high time it got out into the public domain.
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