29Jul16: Completed the first three sections of the Dlugorai Lute Book, a massive MS consisting of 530 pages of music for 8-course lute, in a somewhat idiosyncratic form of German tablature, divided into different sections. The first section consists of preludes and various exercises, samples of cadential endings (“cadentia” and “finales”), etc. The second consists of “fugae”, which seem more like preludes than fugues, and passamezzi. The third consists of fantasies plus one galliard. The scribe is quite careless, especially in the placement and value of the rhythm flags, so a fair amount of interpretation and modification has been necessary to produce a reasonable result. Frequent line errors indicate that some of the pieces may have been copied from sources in French or Italian tab.
After I completed my edition of these first three parts, I discovered that John Robinson had covered much of the same ground in his editions for LSA and Tree. In comparing our editions, I found that we agreed on about 90% of the corrections, which was very reassuring, because John is a very able and experienced editor. In those spots where I liked his corrections better than mine, I put his initials [jhr] in the footnotes documenting the corrections. I retain full responsibility for any errors in my editions, however. I hope they are few.
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