San Miguel de Allende

The Art of Fantasía For All Guitars and Lutes

The Art of Fantasía For All Guitars and Lutes:
A Modern Guide to Counterpoint
in the 16th Century Spanish Style
Containing an Abridged Edition of the
Arté de Tañer Fantasía (1565) of
Fray Thomás de Sancta Maria
Selected For Study on Fretted Instruments
And A History of Intonation and Fret Setting

By Jack Zelenka
© 2024

Based on the Libro Llamado Arté de Tañer Fantasía
of Thomás de Sancta Maria (1565)
The last update was 12-26-2024. The file name includes the most recent date. Please delete any files with earlier dates, and take this one. As matters stand, there are some remaining errors, but I will wait to compile the corrections into a new file, to avoid the proliferation of minor version changes. There is no end to minor typos: they spontaneously generate!

The work is a guide to modal counterpoint in the 16th century style. There are quite a number of classic and modern works on this subject, but there is not even one (until the present work) which addresses four-part counterpoint on the fingerboard of the guitar and lute, much less fugue in four parts. Don't get too excited, though: Thomás de Sancta María's material was composed for the keyboard, and requires considerable creative adaptation. All that I have done is to transcribe it into Grand Staff, which I used just to make sure that the "classical" guitarists can't read it. However, any well-educated guitar player who can read the Grand Staff can enjoy it.

This is an introduction to fugal composition on the guitar and lute using the method and teachings of the Spanish Dominican monk Thomás de Sancta María (1510 - 1570). Other works on the composition of fugue require a keyboard and deal mainly with the later Baroque style of fugue; the present work is unique both in addressing specifically the 16th-century Spanish style, and in presenting a method adaptable to the technique of plucked, fretted, stringed instruments: specifically the guitar, vihuela and lute.

The introductory Volume I is a speculative history of intonation, including the historical fret patterns used on the Arabian oud over a thousand years ago, and their continuing use on the lute and vihuela until the 16th century. This first volume serves as a technical introduction to the work of Thomás de Sancta Maria which is the basis of the last two volumes.

Volume III of this book, the main course, is a study of 16th-century-style fugue, to be played on (theoretically) any guitar or lute (but eight courses would be useful). Volume II is a study of fingerboard harmony in the 16th-century Spanish style. The material in these two latter volumes is mostly taken directly from the Libro Llamado Arté de Tañer Fantasía of the Spanish Dominican monk Thomás de Sancta Maria, published in Valladolid in 1565. That original work took TSM sixteen years to write and six more years to publish, putting its inception about 1543, before the publication of Mudarra's Tres Libros in 1546. It was written for the keyboard (although TSM says that it is equally applicable to the vihuela, which is true except for the issues of range, since it would require an 8-course vihuela to completely realize) and was composed in typical 16th-century staff notation in which the four voices are written on separate staves without strict vertical alignment. I tried hard to read these non-aligned scores but I decided that it would be faster to transcribe them, which took me about six months in 2018. I have made my own completely new transcriptions into "modern" grand staff, working from an online scan of the original print, and I have checked them for accuracy over the last several years by playing them many times myself and double checking all questionable passages. It does happen that there are mistakes in TSM's own print; I have made corrections with explanatory notes. I have not referred to the transcriptions done by previous researchers. There are at least two other sets of transcriptions which have been done in recent decades besides mine, but my transcriptions are my own, brand new, and (almost!) error-free. It is impossible to claim 100% accuracy in transcribing such a vast work, but I have gradually eliminated my original errors to the point where I am 99% confident in sharing my transcriptions with other musicians. If you should find any errors, please let me know, of course. I will be happy to re-investigate and discuss any passage which any reader would like to question: this would be time well spent. The several years that I have spent writing Volume One - the last to be finished - has given me time to proofread my transcriptions, and I am reasonably confident of their accuracy.

The PDF will be correctly displayed if the PDF reader is set to center the first page and make the second page a left-hand page, and the third a right-hand page. The page numbers and marginal notes will then be shown in the outside margins. There are no separate page numbers for the Front Matter, so that the page numbers given in the Indices and TOC match the page numbers of the PDF as viewed in the PDF viewer. Although there will be no printed edition, the PDF is set up to print on either US Letter or A4 paper, and may be spiral bound using the center margin. I encourage serious readers to make their own print copies of Volumes II and III, which contain a great deal of staff notation best viewed on a music stand away from the pinche compu (in my opinion).

Completely contrary to the usual modern practice, I have NOT added "editorial" inflections. I have reproduced only TSM's own sharps and flats exactly as he gave them, which are incomplete, in accord with standard 16th-century practice, and according to a standard by which the reader of the staff notation was supposed to know when it was necessary, possible, or desirable to inflect a note sharp or flat, without being prompted by an accidental sign, famously called a mark "for donkeys" by Tinctoris in the late 15th century. TSM often marks a sharp or flat only once for a particular harmonic device, the first time that he presents it. He does so as a didactic concession, and then he expects the reader to remember the inflection the next time he or she encounters the same device. For an editor to begin to enthusiastically add editorial inflections is to shortly find himself or herself in deep and murky water: there are many mandatory inflections at the cadences which are unmarked but uncontroversial as to their realization, but there are also many optional inflections, such as the occasional augmented sixth chord cadence, and passing inflections in the passage work, which offer the reader the opportunity to make creative decisions based on personal taste just as did the vihuelistas. It is evident from the tablatures that there is a good deal of possible flexibility in the choice of inflections in some cases, while in other cases there are consistent rules which should be followed by the informed musician. Instead of pablum, I offer information - and I have given it exhaustively, particularly in Book V, with a thorough theoretical preparation in Books I through IV - so that the reader may make his or her own choices about the inflection of TSM's music. The chromatic inflection of 16th century music is an art requiring study: I offer that opportunity, rather than spoon-feeding the reader my own specific interpretations of the details of inflection as is done in typical modern editions for the uninformed. As Vincenzo Galilei admonished his readers, don't offer the "silly excuse" that you are just reading what's on the page! It is necessary to study the issues of inflection; this work is for the serious student of TSM's Arte, and it doesn't make a lot of concessions to the casual reader or to the lookie-loos. If you jump into playing the fugues without reading the text - with particular attention to my Book V - you will miss this necessary information. There are on You-Tube quite a number of embarrassing performances of TSM's fugues, on lutes and keyboards, in which it is evident that the performer has NOT studied TSM's text, and has no fricking idea how to inflect a cadence in the 16th-century style. I sincerely hope that no one will use my transcriptions to produce such naive recordings.

Volume One begins with an introduction to tuning theory, and I write at some length about the history of the European tonal system, and the relationship of the fret patterns used by Luis Milan et alia, to that history. Volume One borders on being a Theory of Everything and a History of the Universe, for which I apologize, but there is a lot of very interesting material to be found in the study of ancient monochords and fret patterns, in particular in the comparison of the maqams and the church modes as they appear on the fingerboard. Perhaps you have not noticed that the Church Modes fall in two precise parallel patterns on the fingerboard: the plagal modes on A-B-C-D on the A-string of the vihuela, and the authentic modes on D-E-F-G on the D-string - as though they grew there. It is a myth that the church modes were derived from the Greek tonoi: they arrived on the fingerboard of the oud, on which they fit idiomatically, and have since the 10th century CE, while the Greek tonoi do not fit onto the fingerboard or into any historical fret patterns on the lute. It was to correct this historical misunderstanding that I wrote Volume One. Probably there are few guitar and lute players who will be interested in such esoterica: this book is for them. This history of fret patterns is the key to understanding the issues of the so-called musica ficta, that is, the idiomatic 16th-century use of sharps and flats by TSM and by the vihuelistas, who used the same tonal system.

TSM's fugues in general require an eight-course instrument for a complete realization, and certainly the vast majority of readers will be playing six-course instruments, which is like viewing the scores through a limiting lens which can only view a part of the range. Committed six-string players will no doubt work with this limitation creatively, and are encouraged to do so. Players of instruments with seven, eight, or more courses will find ample scope for the full use of their instruments. A thorough study of this work along with a study of the vihuela tablatures will reveal how the vihuelistas used these techniques on 4, 5 and 6 courses. A cadence on a 15th is standard on the six-course instrument, but a cadence at the 22nd requires eight courses. Six course players will have a lot of pruning to do to fit these fugues on their instruments. Certainly it can be done and I don't discourage anyone. For comparison at the opposite end of the spectrum, I recommend playing Mudarra's fantasías for the four-course guitar, in which the counterpoint is necessarily very compact.

Perhaps the most appropriate instrument on which to study these fugues would be an A-lute tuned (top down) A4-E4-B3-G3-D3-A2, with five open bass strings tuned G2-F2-E2-D2-C2 which are the diatonic notes of the "short octave" on TSM's keyboard. My own solution is a nine-course fanned-fret guitar, string lengths 600-720 mm, tuned A4-E4-B3-G3-D3-A2-E2-B1-F#1. Your choice is your own.

This is the only existing work on fugue for the guitar and lute. I myself have at times despaired of ever mastering it, but I am encouraged by the results of my more recent studies, for which I have more time now that I have finished composing this darned book, which has taken all of my spare time for the last eight years. After memorizing a certain number of TSM's fugues, I have begun to see the connecting links between the elements of TSM's vast database, and I understand that if one were to memorize all of the fugues in the book, that most of them display inter-connecting links which make it possible to string the individual fugues which are in similar modes together in any order according to the whim of the moment, and this is indeed the improvisation of fantasía. But in the short term it is not possible, in my opinion, to improvise completely new fugal episodes: these must be composed, practiced and memorized ahead of time to be ready for use. The amazing ability to improvise a fugue in so many voices on a brand-new theme, reported of J. S. Bach, was clearly dependent on his own possession of a vast mental database similar to that composed by TSM. Our first task is not to improvise, but to study the database. The improvisatory aspect lies in being able to frame any cadence grammatically in order to allow the entrance of a new theme, and this is done by choosing from a repertory of memorized components. TSM's treatment of cadences is every bit as extensive as his treatment of fugal themes, and this is one of the great strengths of his work when compared with many later writers on fugue. He describes them, relentlessly and repetitively, in the terms of a technical language resembling that of figured bass. To the modern harmonist this language appears archaic, simplistic and tautological, but once one analyzes these structures in terms of fingering patterns, they turn out to be an accurate technical description of essential composition details. Zarlino treats the subject flippantly: "Even peasants know how to inflect cadences," he says, and declines to elaborate. Fux gives the relationship between fugal subject and cadence no more than three pages. TSM has the real gold, and here it is.
1018 pages
676 MB, three volumes together in one PDF file


Overview of the Contents

Thomás de Sancta Maria's Libro Llamado Arte de Tañer Fantasía, or "the Book Called the Art of Playing Fantasía" (1565), on which Books 6, 7, and 9 - 12 of the present work are based (while the other Books are commentary), is one of the great monuments of 16th-century Spanish music theory. It is one of the great early works on the theory of fugue, and it has the additional virtue of being technically accessible to players of the guitar and lute.

Volume One, a "Musica Speculativa" following the classical models of Boethius and Zarlino, is a history of intonation. The vihuelists of 16th century Spain used a limited set of accidental inflections, only three sharps and two flats, derived from a fret pattern already played on the oud in the 9th century CE. In order to understand the origin of Spanish inflection practice, we will investigate the development of the musical languages of the Old World, focusing on that of ancient Greece, and then we will examine the projection of the Greek "Perfect Immutable System" onto the fingerboard of the oud in the 9th century CE, and compare the patterns of fingering and fretting used on the oud in the Middle East from the 9th through 13th centuries with those of 16th century Spain. The point of intersection between the classical Greek system, the oud, and the nascent church modes illuminates questions about the origin of the church modes which are not answerable by the traditional appeal to Greek theory alone. The tension between Just and Pythagorean fret patterns is shown to have a continuous history on the oud since the 9th century.

Volume Two, a "Musica Practica," deals with modal counterpoint in four real parts. The pivotal Book Five, on the so-called musica ficta, sums up the research reported in Volume One with examples from the vihuela tablatures. Four-part harmony, much neglected in guitar and lute pedagogy, is addressed in Books Six and Seven with authentic material taken directly from TSM's Arte, largely avoiding references to "functional" harmony, which is inapplicable to this style. Book Eight is anachronistically devoted to the 18th-century practice of Species Counterpoint in the style of Fux, in order to place this useful study method in its correct perspective against authentic 16th-century practice, which it is purported to represent, but in fact does so only in a limited way, because it was invented in the 17th century and perfected in the 18th as a very stylized re-creation of a then-obsolete style of composing.

Volume Three is devoted to Fugue itself. This immense body of material contains dozens of examples by TSM of the construction of fugal expositions in four parts. The study of this material will probably require several years, and should not be approached in a hurry. Of the earlier material in Volumes One and Two, it is essential to have read Book Five, the first book of Volume Two, on inflection and on the issues of the so-called musica ficta, before studying the material on fugue, in order to avoid naive errors in the inflections of cadences and fugal subjects.