(It.).
Any collection of solo instrumental music, usually for lute or keyboard and printed during the 16th or 17th century, which is ‘in tablature’. The term was often used in its literal sense, as in Francesco Spinacino’s Intabulatura de lauto: libro primo (Venice, 1507) and Antonio Valente’s Intavolatura de cimbalo (Naples, 1576), which are in Italian lute tablature and Spanish–Italian keyboard tablature respectively. However, the word ‘intavolatura’ and its most common derivatives (tabulatura, intavolate, tabulati, intabulatura, intabolatura, intavolature, etc.) were frequently used on the title-pages of 16th- and 17th-century Italian and German sources to describe music printed not in one of the conventional tablatures but in keyboard score (on two staves) or, at a slightly later date, in keyboard partitura. This use of the term derives from the fact that the earliest of such sources often contained compositions that had orginally been written for voices but which had been ‘intabulated’ (i.e. put into notation for solo instrumental performance); it was thus intended to indicate that the music had been adapted to keyboard notation rather than to convey the precise nature of the new notation. Invariably these intabulations involved a degree of elaboration of the original material. The use of the term ‘intavolatura’ was later extended to include collections of works conceived originally for keyboard instruments. The earliest surviving intavolatura for keyboard is the Frottole intabulate da sonare organi: libro primo, issued in 1517 by the Rome printer Andrea Antico. The use of the term ‘tabulatura’ to describe the keyboard partitura is first seen in German publications of the 1620s, notably in Samuel Scheidt’s Tabulatura nova (Hamburg, 1624).
See also Partitura and Tablature.
WolfH
W. Apel: The Notation of Polyphonic Music 900–1600 (Cambridge, MA, 1942, 5/1961; Ger. trans., rev., 1970)
JOHN MOREHEN