ABILITY RATING
Info
Key G Major (Dorian)
Tempo 190/170bpm
Moderate/Advanced
Will improve your…
✓ Campanella technique
✓ Plucking-hand arpeggiation
✓ Knowledge of the Spanish vihuela
During the Renaissance period the lute become a popular instrument to write for, with composers such as John Dowland, Francesco Canova da Milano, and Pierre Attaingnant publishing hundreds of works for the instrument, much of which is still regularly performed today. In Spain, however, a lesser-known instrument called the vihuela had become popular alongside the lute with a somewhat more humble list of composers including Luis de Narváez and Luis de Milan who largely created the repertoire for the instrument.
The Spanish vihuela was one of the earliest incarnations of what eventually became the modern Spanish orfour pairs (courses) of strings, the vihuela had six courses that were tuned to E-A-D-F#-B-E, so despite the 500-year gulf between modern guitarists and the vihuelists of the Renaissance, not a huge amount has changed in that time, tuning-wise. The idea behind having courses of strings rather than single strings is a simple engineering solution that partly overcomes the acoustic limitation of the instrument. Think of it as similar to modern guitars such as the 12-string acoustic or the eight-string ukulele: two strings are rather louder than one!
