Campanelas Rediscovered

The guitar music of Robert de Visée was rediscovered halfway the nineteenth century. In Napoleon Coste's Methode (ca. 1851) and the Livre d'or (1880) there are transcriptions of several of Visée's compositions. This music became more widely known through a gramophone recording by Andres Segovia from 1944, and an entire generation of guitarists grew up with Karl Scheit's twentieth-century transcriptions of suites from Visée's Livre de pièces pour la guittarre (1686). Transcribing from tablature presupposes a theory about how the instrument was strung, and in his editions from the 1960s and ‘70s Scheit assumes that the five-course guitar had both the fourth and the fifth courses strung in octaves. In the transcriptions these two courses are sometimes used as part of the treble melody (as campanelas—although Scheit did not use this term) and for the rest in the lower octave, as a bass (ex. 6.1).

For the revival of the baroque guitar, the publication of Sylvia Murphy's article on tuning in The Galpin Society Journal of 1970 has been crucial. This article reviewed a number of important sources, and it has been referenced by many authors since. Murphy presented the three tunings probably most commonly in use: (a) tuning with one bourdon each on the fourth and fifth courses (“Italian tuning”); (b) re-entrant tuning (with no bourdons); and (c) “French tuning,” with one bourdon on the fourth course. She was one of the first writers to note the effect of campanelas (scale passages in which alternate notes are played on different courses, giving an effect like a peal of bells as successive notes ring on at the same time), specifically in connection with re-entrant tuning, and illustrates this with an example of music from the well-known Pavanas by Gaspar Sanz. These idiomatic passages could apparently be performed convincingly only on a guitar without bourdons.

In the last part of the twentieth century, several views have crystallized on the tuning of the guitar and the performance of this repertoire. The more music of the seventeenth century was played, the clearer it became that there have been many composers who used the fourth and fifth courses as trebles.