(Ger. Intabulierung; It. intavolatura, intabolatura).
An arrangement for keyboard, lute or other plucked string instrument of a vocal composition; the term is especially applied to those prepared in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, and written in Tablature, the system of notation using letters, figures or other symbols instead of notes on a staff. The 16th- and 17th-century keyboard pieces published in Italy and designated ‘d’intavolatura’ (as in ‘Canzone d’intavolatura’) are exceptions to the general practice, since that repertory includes abstract instrumental canzonas, toccatas, variation sets etc., as well as arrangements of vocal compositions; thus ‘intavolatura’ seems in this case to refer not to the genre of the composition but to the fact that the music was printed in staff notation on two staves, as opposed to ‘partiture’ (the plural of ‘partitura’), in which each part is given a separate staff. In general, intabulations from the 14th century to the 16th incorporate all or almost all the voices of the vocal composition into the arrangement, although on occasion less important voices are omitted, several voices are combined into one, or chords and even whole passages are redistributed to make them fit better under the hands of a single player. Almost invariably, the arrangements are enriched by more or less extensive embellishment.
The practice of making intabulations arose in the late Middle Ages, doubtless as a result of the fact that keyboard players had to prepare special scores for themselves when they wished to take part in performances of vocal music, which was normally written into manuscripts not in score but as a series of separate parts (‘choirbook format’). The earliest intabulations appear in the Robertsbridge Codex (GB-Lbl Add.28850), dated about 1360 and written in a combination of staff notation and letters. The manuscript includes two intabulations of motets from the Roman de Fauvel, taken over fairly literally from the vocal parts but adapted to fit within the player’s hands and with ornamentation added to the upper voices. The Reina Manuscript (F-Pn n.a.fr.6771), one of the most important sources of 14th-century polyphonic secular music, contains a single keyboard piece, an arrangement in score of Questa fanciulla, a ballata by Francesco Landini, in which the upper part is highly decorated. But the largest repertory of 14th-century intabulations – and the largest repertory of keyboard music in general – is the Faenza Codex, possibly written as late as the early 15th century, but containing an exclusively Trecento repertory, including extravagantly embellished intabulations of French music by Machaut, Pierre des Molins and various anonymous composers, as well as arrangements of secular Italian music by Jacopo da Bologna, Bartolino da Padova, Landini, Antonio Zacar da Teramo and others, all notated in score.
From the 15th century an extensive repertory of intabulations for keyboard instruments survives in German sources, all written in a keyboard tablature that combines letters with staff notation. The largest manuscript by far, the Buxheimer Orgelbuch, prepared probably in the third quarter of the 15th century, contains some 256 compositions, many of them intabulations, and it includes one composition marked ‘in cytaris vel etiam in organis’ (‘either for harp or for organ’). But there are also almost a dozen smaller German sources of 15th-century keyboard music (ed. W. Apel, CEKM, i), and they all furnish additional examples of intabulating technique. Like the other compositions in the Buxheimer Orgelbuch, the intabulations of motets, lieder and, above all, French chansons (the leading secular genre in the 15th century) follow the precedents established in the previous century. For the most part, all voices of the vocal model are taken over into the solo arrangements and a more or less elaborate process of ornamentation is applied to the upper voices, often turning it from a lyrical melody into a perpetuum mobile in keyboard style. The lower voices are left much as they were in the vocal model, or varied or ornamented slightly, or reduced to a single part by omitting the contratenor altogether or combining it with the tenor. In some compositions the intabulators have recomposed relatively brief sections.
With the change in playing technique from plectrum to fingers in the late 15th century, lutenists and other players of plucked string instruments began to perform polyphonic music, including arrangements of masses, motets and secular music. The invention of music printing enabled publishers to issue great quantities of music for keyboard instruments, as well as for lutes, vihuelas, guitars, citterns and other plucked strings (see BrownI). Thus in the 16th century the number of intabulations increased sharply.
The technique of intabulation, as explained, for example, by Adrian Le Roy and Vincenzo Galilei, remained essentially the same throughout the century. Musicians were taught to take over into their arrangements as much of the vocal model as the techniques of their instruments would allow. Lutenists and keyboard players were expected to play most four-part music literally (not all of them did so), although they might need to omit some voices, or to thin the texture slightly in places, when they intabulated compositions with five, six or more voices. Guitarists and cittern players, on the other hand, could not be so literal; at times they give the merest impression of the original part-writing.
Virtually all 16th-century intabulators added ornamentation to the vocal models they arranged, partly out of necessity, since fast passage-work helped to sustain the fragile sounds of lute, vihuela and harpsichord. Even so, many virtuosos added more ornaments than modern musicians think tasteful, although some, such as the vihuelist Miguel de Fuenllana, scarcely ornamented their models at all. Many instrumentalists of the 16th century relied mostly on pre-formed stereotyped figuration patterns, runs, turns and trills. Sometimes Francesco Spinacino and Joan Ambrosio Dalza, who published anthologies of lute music in the first decade of the century, maintained quaver or semiquaver motion almost constantly from beginning to end of a piece, obscuring the contours of their models beneath an avalanche of endless and directionless scale fragments. Similarly, the German keyboard composers of the last 30 years of the 16th century, including Ammerbach, Schmid, Paix and Nörmiger – the so-called ‘colourists’ – overwhelmed their models with mechanical decoration. Hans Gerle, a German lutenist of the mid-16th century, on the other hand, sometimes left out one inner voice or more to make his showy diminutions easier to play, and he sprinkled diverse ornamental clichés throughout a piece apparently at random. Heavily ornamented intabulations from the mid-century often restrict the number of stereotyped figuration patterns applied to any one section of a composition. Repeated wherever possible, these ornamental clichés form a superstructure, so to speak, over the given vocal piece, a network of motifs independent of the original conception. Diego Ortiz used this technique in his arrangements printed in his treatise on the viol, and some lutenists, like Sebastian Ochsenkun, seem to have adopted the same procedure. Some of the greatest virtuosos of the century, like Valentin Bakfark and Francesco da Milano, went further than lesser musicians in ornamenting their models, sometimes transforming the originals into idiomatic and virtuoso instrumental pieces by means of a profusion of ever-varying runs, turns and trills. They seem to have used the original music as a vehicle for comment and elaboration, for a virtuoso display of variation technique.
Intabulations of 16th-century vocal music provide instruction, then, in the techniques of embellishment used by a variety of musicians in performance, and are helpful in indicating the difference between the way music looks on the page and how it must have sounded in the Renaissance. Tablatures, especially those for plucked string instruments, are also useful in elucidating how 16th-century musicians added accidentals to music, according to the rules of musica ficta, since tablature indicates precisely where performers were to put their fingers on the strings, and hence is more apt to include the particular chromatic inflections heard in performance than music written in staff notation.
ApelG
BrownI
O. Körte: Laute und Lautenmusik bis zur Mitte des 16. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig, 1901/R)
O.A. Baumann: Das deutsche Lied und seine Bearbeitungen in den frühen Orgeltabulaturen (Kassel, 1934)
D. Plamenac: ‘Keyboard Music of the Fourteenth Century in Codex Faenza 117’, JAMS, iv (1951), 179–201
D. Plamenac: ‘New Light on Codex Faenza 117’, IMSCR V: Utrecht 1952, 310–26
N. Pirrotta: ‘Note su un codice di antiche musiche per tastiera’, RMI, lvi (1954), 333–9
B.A. Wallner, ed.: Das Buxheimer Orgelbuch, DM, 2nd ser., Handschriften-Faksimiles, i (1955); repr. in EDM, xxxvii–xxxix (1958–9) [facs.]
W. Apel, ed.: Keyboard Music of the Fourteenth & Fifteenth Centuries, CEKM, i (1963)
E. Southern: The Buxheim Organ Book (Brooklyn, NY, 1963)
H.R. Zöbeley: Die Musik des Buxheimer Orgelbuchs (Tutzing, 1964)
H.M. Brown: ‘Accidentals and Ornamentation in Sixteenth-Century Intabulations of Josquin’s Motets’, Josquin des Prez: New York 1971, 475–522
D. Plamenac, ed.: Keyboard Music of the Late Middle Ages in Codex Faenza 117, CMM, lvii (1972)
H.M. Brown: ‘Embellishment in Early Sixteenth-Century Italian Intabulations’, PRMA, c (1973–4), 49–83
C. Jacobs, ed.: Antonio Valente: Intavolatura de Cimbalo (Naples, 1576) (Oxford, 1973)
C. Jacobs, ed.: Miguel de Fuenllana: Orphénica Lyra (Seville, 1554) (Oxford, 1978)
C. Jacobs, ed.: Elias Nicolaus Ammerbach: Orgel oder Instrument Tabulaturbuch 1571/83 (Oxford, 1984)
HOWARD MAYER BROWN