Re: "Hatikvah" and "La Mantovana"

[Hope Ehn Dennis Ehn <ehn...>]

Calling Giamberti's tune the "Hatikvah" tune isn't something I made up
because I wanted to find it. Giamberti *himself* gave that setting the
name "Ballo di Mantua," which was one of the names by which one finds the
tune in 17th-century manuscripts. Certainly, the Zanetti tune, which is
recognized by Matthew Fields as that tune, has a similar name -- "La
Mantovana." The Mantuan association appears in the titles of many settings
of that tune; as far as I know, this kind of name is applied to no other
tune.

The basic outline of the tune is this: up a minor scale to the 5th, minor
6th, back to the 5th, down stepwise to the minor 3rd, cadence by one or
another means on the tonic. Then the tune leaps an octave, proceeding
downward stepwise (with differing details) to cadence on the 5th. It moves
downward again to the tonic, proceeding more or less by step. The next few
measures are a transition to the repeat of the first phrase. This is the
melodic outline of *all* the examples I posted -- Playford, Zanetti,
Giamberti. If you get stuck in the details, no two tunes are identical.
(It would hardly surprise me if somewhere, someone weren't singing "Happy
Birthday" with a note or two being different.)

Fux (writing in 1725 or thereabouts) has absolutely *no* relevance to
Renaissance theory! I suggest that you try Morley, which is available as a
Norton paperback. There are also several other Renaissance theory
treatises easily accessible in English. People who have no experience with
Renaissance music and Renaissance theory are not in a good position to
criticize other peoples' statements about these matters.

I am aware that the published sources of the tune are from the 17th
century, but while genres such as opera are Baroque from their inception,
many other genres, including dance music and secular polyphonic vocal
music, followed Renaissance practices for a long time. This does not mean
that *no* composer wrote dances or madrigals, etc. according to Baroque
rules (Rossi, for one, did). But generally, Renaissance practice was slow
to die in the more "popular" genres of secular music.

The notation is one I made up myself in the shower. I have neither the
time nor the inclination to learn another system of notation in order to
post a couple of tunes. I have no intention of posting on-line any music
that is more complicated than a tune.

If this is going to be a group on which a complicated notational system
must be learned, on which scholarship is unwelcome and 1725 is in the
Renaissance, and on which people feel it necessary to put down others with
high-handed posts about unimportant details, I am going to have to give
serious consideration not only to unsubscribing from the list, but also to
removing the list and newsgroup from the list of mailing lists and
newsgroups in "On-Line Resources for Classical and Academic Musicians."
There has certainly been very little discussion that could be called
"academic" or "scholarly" (in the best sense of those words), and there
has been relatively little attention paid to music that could be called
"classical."

Hope Ehn                           <ehn (at) world(dot)std(dot)com>
M.M., New England Conservatory
Graduate study in musicology, Brandeis University
Faculty, Cambridge Center for Adult Education

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Dennis and Hope Ehn are 2 different people sharing one account.
Hope is the author of "On-Line Resources for Classical & Academic Musicians."
Dennis does programming (mostly C++).
PLEASE don't get us confused!                                 :-)
<ehn (at) world(dot)std(dot)com>
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