Edited: Göran Crona 2011 Dear friend of the arts, Whosoever you are, stay for a while at this entrance of my garden and, if you like, hear what you have to be told about the reason of my enterprise. Initially, you must know that you shouldn't expect a tutor with rules how to study the lute or how to transpose vocal music unto the lute. If you are looking for something like that you'd better turn
... [Show full abstract] to Emmanuel Adriansen's "Pratum Musicum" (Antwerps, 1592) or Antoine Francisque's work (Paris 1600) in its popular french version, the doctrine of which G. L. Fuhrmann added in German to his "Testudo Gallo-Germanica" (Nuremberg 1615), or to J. B. Besard's printed edition "Thesaurus Harmonicus" (Cologne 1603) for I didn't intend to do again what's already done. Furthermore, you should be clear about the fact that I deviated from the common use of the authors to be seen here in not taking only very few pieces of singular kinds into my work, as others do, but the way learners are usually presented almost only preludes, fantasies and fugues in the beginning, I shall in the present first part of this work give you nothing but merely preludes, fantasies and fugues, and this not tight-fistedly but from a full hand, as the saying has it. I offer you as many as I could find in my books and have judged worth it but in such a way that you must yourself make your easy or rather difficult choice from such a multitude and variety. For the second part, if the first will have pleased, I have saved the most selected pieces which amuse by their sweetness and their novelty alike as there are (the following un-Latin names be allowed:) courants, volts, branles, ballets, galliards, passemezzi and the like that I possess in a great number. Since among all authors of the art of the lute that I could obtain (I have acquired about 18 old and modern editions) none satisfied me more than that of Antione Francisque, I have taken care that mine looks like his in terms of bar measuring and letters on the lines. For although our Germans are not used to the so called french tablature, exercise and practice will easily overcome what is difficult, particularly because here the letters have been put above the line whereas otherwise they are usually put on the line.
