mainly deals with the “leg-viol” or viola da gamba. (Its title, “Ruberto’s rules,” is a tribute to Ruberto
Strozzi, a member of a celebrated Italian family of noble musical amateurs.)
After some rudimentary instruction on playing technique, both manuals shift over to the more creative
aspects of instrumental performance, which grew directly out of the kind of music-making Tinctoris had
described a hundred years earlier, when he wrote about the two blind brothers who converted famous
songs into dazzling instrumental displays (see chapter 13, Ex. 13-15). In the sixteenth century, the virtuoso
instrumentalist’s repertoire was still largely parasitic on vocal music. The art of instrumental virtuosity
was the art of passaggii or passage work, in which the plain “classical” lines of sacred or secular songs
in the ars perfecta style were converted into flamboyantly ornamental sonic cascades and necklaces. One
learned the technique by systematically breaking down a song into its component intervallic progressions
—up a third, down a fourth, and so on—and memorizing dozens of note patterns to decorate each interval,
which one could later apply in actual performance to any song, and on the basis of which one could
eventually evolve one’s own personal style of playing “diminutions” (or “divisions”), as this process of
substituting many short notes for each long one was called.
The Regola rubertina also contains a number of “preludizing” pieces called “recercars” like
Spinacino’s (or Francesco’s) for the lute. Such pieces were evidently better suited to string technique,
whether plucked or bowed, then wind. Ortiz’s Trattado de glosas or “Treatise on embellishments”
(Rome, 1553), which like Ganassi’s Regola rubertina is addressed to viol players, also contains
“recercadas” galore, in addition to even more systematic instruction in diminution. Ortiz’s methods are
more sophisticated and detailed, and give us an even more embarrassing sense of how little we know of
old music when all we know is what was written down—and, even more important, what is lost from
music as well as what is gained in the process of its becoming literate.
The first half of Ortiz’s text is devoted to diminution technique in the abstract. The second half
consists of model recercadas for every occasion, showing how diminution technique, once internalized,
was applied in practice. First come the “free” improvisations—actually strings of little cadence formulas
subjected to transposition, sequential treatment and diminution. Then there are recercadas based on
individual voice parts extracted from polyphonic classics. This is just a more thoroughgoing application
of the embellishment practices shown in Ex. 15-9b.
Then come the really creative exercises, the ones that really give a glimpse of a vanished musical
culture. They begin with recercadas in the cantus firmus style (or as Ortiz has it in his native language,
recercadas over a canto llano, a “plainsong”). Here the player had to be able at one and the same time to
imagine a discant against a familiar tenor and to embellish it with diminutions. What is particularly
interesting and instructive about Ortiz’s examples is the source of his cantus firmus. Although he says that
the technique he is imparting may be applied to any church chant (and might well have provided music to
accompany the same moments in the service as Segni’s or Buus’s organ ricercari), the actual tenor Ortiz
selected on which to compose his illustrative examples was one that had been used for over a century by
dance bands.
DANCES OLD AND NEW
We have seen written traces of instrumental dance music going back to the thirteenth century (Fig. 4-8).
But of course dance music, being an eminently functional genre, was one of the slowest to “go literate” in
any major or transforming way; and when it did, it did so piecemeal. The earliest extensive manuscript
collections of instrumental dances come from the fifteenth century and were devoted to the noblest and
courtliest ballroom dance genre or the time, a processional dance for couples known in Italian as