| From the earliest extant sources of keyboard works from the fourteenth century through the seventeenth century and beyond, keyboard players throughout Europe devised and employed a variety of notational systems in order to record and transmit their works. Instead of a single, standardized, pan-European system, keyboard players found multiple solutions to the notation dilemma, resulting in national and sometimes even regional variations. Composers, performers, and printers in Germanic lands gravitated toward tablatures comprising some combination of letters and traditional notes or of letters alone. During the late sixteenth century, writers and composers in Spain devised a similar tablature system based on numbers instead of letters. Manuscripts and publications from Italy used staff notation incorporating the notes and lines of the vocal mensural system. French and English sources generally followed Italian notational models.; Many sources from recent decades have disseminated valuable information on historical methods of fingering, pedaling, articulation, ornamentation, and registration. Just as contemporary keyboard players study and apply these methods when performing early works, much can be gained by learning and playing from the original notations. Knowledge of early staff and tablature systems provides and awareness and background for scholar-performers when confronting issues of modern editing. By grappling with historical notations, modern scholar-performers can also gain a deeper understanding of the original setting, presentation, and nature of the early keyboard repertoire.; Following a chapter on two fourteenth-century sources and their precedents, the succeeding chapters present the various systems of notation found in western Europe during the Middle Ages and Renaissance according to national-cultural boundaries. Sources originating from Germanic lands are further divided by their dual systems of tablature: old German keyboard tablature, which incorporates both notes and letters; and new German keyboard tablature, which employs letters alone. Since staff notations are far more comfortable and accessible to modern keyboard players, the bulk of this thesis centers on the letter and number tablature notations from Germany and Spain. |
