User:Lex

Slovak organist and math student, born 2003. Avid fan of Renaissance music and Old German tablature notation.

Aiming to write pages on notable German manuscripts and organists prior to ~1600, along with a comprehensive guide to the older system of tablature.

Plays a 1914 organ of one manual and seven stops.

Manuál				Pedál
Principál		8'		Subbass		16'
Kryt		8'
Salicionál		8'		Annulator
Octáva		4'		Spoj. pedál
Fléta		4'		Piano
Mixtura		2 ⅔'		Forte

Occasionally also an organ from 1861, modified sometime around 1895.

Manuál				Pedál
Kryt		8'		-		8'
Principál		4'
Kryt		4'
Oktava		2'
Mixtura

How to read old tablature

Here are a few hints for those who wish to read music from old tablature. They are all fairly self-evident, but might be worth noting either way.

1. Start with easily legible sources: personally, I find Kleber to have produced the best notation. The fact that his tablature is divided into manualiter and pedaliter sections also helps with finding easier music to start out with (keep in mind, however, that some "manualiter" pieces are better suited to organs with two manuals, and if your practise instrument only has one, this might be an unpleasant surprise). Avoid Sicher until you are comfortable with reading from sources in good handwriting. Similarly, consider putting off the printed Schlick until later: it is easy to read, but quite different from other sources. The three manuscripts associated with Kotter present a mostly decent standard of handwriting, and, even though I enjoy reading from it, the big Buchner book definitely isn't as good.
2. Take advantage of common ornaments: although coloration is nowhere near as mechanical as it is made out to be, many small patterns can nevertheless be observed across pieces - these allow the organist to "collapse" several notes into a single, easily memorisable motion, freeing up mental capacity for more substantial things. The most prominent is the cadential ornament, and committing it to muscle memory will go a long way. Even for slower figures, the stems and flags in the superius being similarly "collapsed" into only one for each grouping helps with visual orientation.
3. Playing is easier than reading: when analysing a piece written in old tablature, it seems that the least difficult way is to focus on the superius and read the letters through peripheral vision, but this can still be rather unpleasant due to the constant need to translate between two kinds of notation. When playing, the opposite approach tends to work better, reading the letters and letting the contours of the upper part guide the right hand without referencing specific pitches (that is, until one loses their way). This ties into the previous point about getting comfortable with the notation of the superius.
4. Figure out the distribution of hands first: as described above, reading staff notation and letters simultaneously isn't the easiest of tasks, especially while sightreading. I suggest first trying to play only the letters with the left hand and marking places where help from the right hand is necessary. Finding out which part is intended for pedals usually only takes a few seconds, but there are exceptions in which the situation is not as clear. Keep in mind also that the notated rhythms serve to coordinate the points at which notes are struck, not their exact lengths - the keyboard technique detailed in Buchner's example fingerings assumes that notes are not held for their entire written duration if the same hand has other notes to strike elsewhere - which the small-handed organist may use to their advantage in certain situations where an unpleasant passage appears.

I use ScanTailor to create monochrome versions of facsimiles (granted, very unclean ones, full of specks) and save printer ink. Should you run into issues with such a process on your machine, feel free to contact me and ask for the particular pages, and I might be able to provide them.