(Fr.: ‘lowered strings’).
A term sometimes found in lute, guitar and mandore music to designate the alteration in tuning of at least one course of strings from the normal pattern. Such alterations afford players a greater compass of notes, more open strings for resonance and ease of playing. Because of the nature of the tablature notation for these instruments, it is as easy to read and play music in the altered tuning as it is in the normal one.
Apparently, the term appears first in the 16th-century printed sources for four-course guitar (G. Morlaye: Quatriesme Livre … de Guyterne, 1552 [‘corde avallée’], and Le Second Livre, 1553 [‘à corde avallée’]; A. Le Roy: Cinqiesme livre de guiterre, 2/1554, and Second livre de guiterre, 2/1555). Here the term indicates that the fourth (i.e. lowest) course is to be tuned a whole tone lower than usual.
The Spanish term for the normal guitar tuning is temple nuevos and, for the equivalent of corde avallée, temple viejos (see J. Bermudo: Declaración de instrumentos musicales, 1555). The latter tuning, without mention of any term, is used by Alonso Mudarra (Tres libros, 1546) for some of his four-course guitar music. In Italy, the altered four-course guitar tuning is used, without designation, by Scipione Cerreto (Della prattica musica, 1601) and in the anonymous collection Conserto vago (1645).
In
lute music the French term first appears in Anthoine Francisque’s Le trésor
d’Orphée (1600), but here two of the lute’s six primary courses are
altered, resulting in the tuning G–B
–f–b–d'–g'. This tuning is also used by Joachim van
den Hove (Florida, 1601) in two pieces. J.B. Besard (Thesaurus
harmonicus, 1603) uses the term for the tuning F–B–f–b–d'–g', in which three courses are altered. This
tuning, with or without the designation, also is found in several other lute
sources from the first half of the 17th century.
Indications in lute music to alter the tuning by lowering only the lowest (sixth) course by a whole tone are found in Italy in Francesco Spinacino’s Libro secondo (1507), where the term ‘basso descordato’ is used, and in German sources (e.g. H. Gerle: Tabulatur auff die Laudten, 1533), which use the term im Abzug (see Abzug (1)). There appears not to be an equivalent English term, but this tuning is used for the lute solos in John Maynard’s The XII Wonders of the World (1611), in which a tuning chart in tablature is provided.
For the mandore, corde avallée is used to indicate that the first (highest) course is to be tuned a whole tone lower than its normal pitch (F. de Chancy: Tablature de mandore, 1629).
Information on tunings not designated cordes avallés are described in Scordatura, §3.
J. Zuth: Handbuch der Laute und Gitarre (Vienna, 1926/R)
E. Pohlmann: Laute, Theorbe, Chitarrone (Bremen, 1968, enlarged 5/1982)
J. Tyler: ‘The Renaissance Guitar 1500–1650’, EMc, iii (1975), 341–7
J. Tyler: The Early Guitar: a History and Handbook (London, 1980)
J. Tyler: ‘The Mandore in the 16th and 17th Centuries’, EMc, ix (1981), 22–31
D. Ledbetter: Harpsichord and Lute Music in 17th-Century France (London, 1987)
J. Tyler and P. Sparks: The Early Mandolin (Oxford, 1989)
E. Schulze-Kurz: Die Laute und ihre Stimmungen in der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Wilsingen, 1990)
JAMES TYLER