Getting some preparation done for a concert in about two months time... when I play Viola d'amore, I'm often writing a scordatura (a sort of fingering tablature...) for myself due to the lack of standardisation of string tunings... which, in the heat of the moment in a concert, has the potential to have bad lapses in concentration with humiliating results. Seeing as I'm not really a fan of that... I write these scordatura with my own particular fingering coding so that I can feel safer in the reading the score.

For this particular set by an old English gambist and composer, Tobias Hume, I am playing two pieces.. Life and Deth (sic) that were originally meant for a 6 string bass gamba. The Viola d'amore is one octave higher, and I will tune it with the same intervals as the bass gamba... but I will have an extra bass string (the 7th one...). After some thought, instead of removing it, I will tune it to a useful bass note that I can use on some of the larger chords.

So, Tobias Hume wrote only in a tablature. Here, you can see the original score for Life... interestingly enough, Life is a touch on the melancholy side of things! Anyway... you can see the rhythm on the top... and each of the gaps in "stave" corresponds to a different string, and each of the letters corresponds to a finger (or an open string). It is quite an elegant way to write a tablature, as it keeps everything well contained and deals with the problem of messy looking chords quite well... but I'm afraid that... whilst I CAN read this tablature, it isn't fast and reliable enough to depend on it in a concert.

A rewrite is in order....

Even though I DO love the elegance of the original manuscript... for this, I decided to pick up another transcription that had both the tablature and the sounding pitch. The bass at pitch, and the alto at an octave transposition. More as a safely against me misreading the tablature... and so that my wife would have something that she could read (the note heads...) when she double checked my work.

Still, the original manuscript was kept on hand as a final arbiter in case of unsureness!

And here you have my scordatura tablature for Life... a particular coding that works for me. Every d'amore player (all 3 of us that are serious about it...) has their own personal coding... and every player and composer in history has their own one as well! No standardisation... a blessing, and a curse...

Next... I will have to get Deth done. It is a much longer and more involved piece... so, I had better get started soon!

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