Intarsia

INTARSIO : V. TARSIA.

INTAVOLATURA. — A now obsolete system of instrumental musical notation.

When, in the second half of the fifteenth century, choral polyphonic music (in which the musical art had attained considerable expressive and technical possibilities) began to be transcribed for instruments that (like the organ) could perform several simultaneous parts, it became necessary to devise a system of notation that would clearly indicate the melodic independence and rhythmic synchronization of the various parts brought together on the keyboard. This system, called i., was essentially the ancestor of our scores, since for the first time it presented the performer’s eye with the various parts arranged in vertical columns, with dividing bars between groups of measures.

The i. are classified according to the type of instrument (i. for organ, harpsichord, lute, guitar), with regard to the different countries (Italian, French, German, Spanish i.) and to the particular systems of notation (alphabetical, musical, ciphered, mixed). In the German i. for organ and harpsichord, alphabetical notation was preferred: A to G for the first octave, a to g for the second, ā to g for the third, and ā to g for the fourth octave (H stands for B). Special signs (dashes and tails variously arranged and placed) were used for chromatic alteration and rhythmic values. The Italian i. for organ and cembalo are laid out on two staves, of which the lower often has a greater number of lines (e.g., seven). Two clefs on the same staff facilitate reading.

Ciphered notation was widely used by the Spanish masters (both for keyboard instruments and for plucked-string instruments). In it, the numbers from 1 to 15 correspond to a range of two octaves. 1 = LA; ninth

first = B-flat; nona seconda = B-natural. Signs derived from common measured notation were added to them (the cipher system introduced in France by a confrère of Fr. Mareenne had successors). Entirely different is the concept underlying notation for lute or guitar. Here it was intended to indicate not the note, but the point at which the finger is placed on the string, that is, the fret. The lines of the staff indicate the strings, and are therefore as numerous as the strings of the instrument itself. The divergence between the Italian and French systems is complete: in the latter, the upper line of the staff corresponds to the highest-pitched string; in the Italian system, on the other hand, it corresponds to the lower line. The French apply letters to the staff, the Italians numbers. The Germans dispense with the staff, while nevertheless retaining the alphabetical notation in an imaginary alignment. Among the earliest theorists to discuss i. is K. Paumann, famous for his Fundamentum arginizandi (1452; ed. Berlin 1925).

I. transmitted and preserved much music from the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. Lute i., in particular, are useful not only for knowledge of the instrument’s technique, but also because they resolve doubtful points in those polyphonic-choral works that were transcribed in the i. themselves.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, master-singers called Tablatur the set of rules for setting a poetic text to music.