Odd Chords

One of the most striking idiosyncrasies of alfabeto lies in the C-minor chord, represented by the letter L. Example 7.1 shows Montesardo's alfabeto chart of 1606. It gives us a normal minor chord, as transcribed in example 7.2 (a). This is difficult for the left hand, however, and the vast majority of the charts soon saw the appearance of another shape: a minor chord with a ninth (b). Only a few composers chose to prescribe the shapes shown in (c) and (d). These are technically more demanding—example 7.2 (d) asks for a barre—and harder to play in a sequence with other chords, such as G minor and D major (alfabeto O and C). Thus, for ease of execution, an unexpected dissonance entered a genre that otherwise makes use of major and minor harmonies exclusively, without even basic dissonances such as 4–3 or 7–6 suspensions, or so it would appear from the standard alfabeto tables. Yet, some guitarists may not have played what the plain alfabeto indicates.

By the time Foscarini, Corbetta, and Bartolotti published the first mixed tablature collections, advanced dissonances did occur in instrumental music, and indeed some of this generation of guitar players were also able performers on the lute, or theorbo, familiar with the advanced harmony of the day. Clearly, even before the publication of Foscarini's book around 1630, there were guitarists familiar with plucked string music and tablature. An interesting suggestion that the musically literate were playing something more complex than simple alfabeto from an early date comes in the form of a manuscript (ca. 1614) from the hand of Petrus Jacobus Pedruil, showing that this otherwise unknown guitarist was skilled in tablature notation. In this manuscript, consisting mostly of music in alfabeto, there are a few pages in tablature with cadential elaborations full of suspensions and resolutions. In the first example of these harmonic explorations (ex. 7.3), besides the “deviant” chords in tablature, there are alfabeto letters O, L, and C (G minor, C minor, and D major) written above their respective tablature chords. We see the C-minor chord (chord L) at the beginning of the fourth measure.