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Tanz, Saltarello, and Country Dances v1
Dear folks: This will be my last installment of Renaissance-styled pieces. I have often paired the super-easy Tanz found in Frederick Noad’s book The Renaissance Guitar with Saltarello, also called La Volta. This lively dance is the closing piece in the Six Lute Pieces of the Renaissance mentioned in my last article.
Saltarello is a lively couples dance featuring jumps/leaps and similarly with the Volta dance, which is known for containing repeated parts, as this certainly has. In older music, added repeats were often used as a form of ornamentation and/or to add ornamentation.
So I printed out Tanz and then added the Gaspar Sanz–styled ornaments on the third line. This piece is slow enough that one can arrive with the first finger for each of these ornaments and keep going right into Salterello without a pause.
Saltarello is attributed to Galileo’s dad,Vincenzo Galilei, who was an amazing theorist who invented monody, described the proper treatment of dissonance, and was a pioneer in the systematic study of acoustics, in addition to being a lutenist and composer. No wonder that Galileo turned out so impressively! I borrowed the different rhythmic treatment of the theme from Charles Duncan in measure 31, which makes the following similar spots in the melody sound like ornaments. In the octave-lowered statement of the theme at measure 65, I added a culminating consequent to the melody that you hear for the first time right here, folks, in measure 70.
Finally, I cadence right into the modern Tanz at measure 88 and celebrate the Tanz melody, adorned with my usual pandiatonic harmonies that, hopefully, you will enjoy. There is no better way to cap off Saltarello than with the lively Country Dance by Jack Duarte!
John W. “Jack” Duarte (1919–2004) had a remarkable career, all focused on our beloved instrument. He was none other than John
Williams’s guitar and music theory instructor for the three years right before Williams entered the Royal College of Music. Williams obviously worked with Jack on his special arrangements of J.S. Bach’s First and Third Cello Suites appearing on his first of more than 40 albums. Nobody published more guitar articles and music than Jack Duarte. Duarte’s Country Dance finishes off a very short suite that he composed.
Our dear departed member Elisabeth Papas Smith, who sponsored a special TGS Sophocles Papas concert, told me that at a Duarte masterclass she attended, Jack referred to pull-off slurs as “snaps” because if they are learned properly, one should be able to hear them snap.
Anyway, I liked this simple dance so much I fleshed it out with fuller chords here and there, added some articulation, additional repeats, and two ornaments at the end. Did you notice the Manuel de Falla–esque harmony in measure 4? Duarte, like Agustín Barrios, composed in many styles.
-- Randy Reed, Music Editor