Intabulation
Transfer of vocal music into tablature.
What it means
Intabulation (German Intavolierung) means: to transfer a polyphonic piece that was originally written for singing voices into the tablature of an instrument, so that a single player can execute it on lute, organ, or harpsichord. The word derives from tablature — the piece is “brought into tablature.” The process is more than a transcription: from four voices of equal rank, each carried by a singer, a texture must be made that two hands can manage.
In the notation
The result appears not in ordinary musical notation but in the respective form of tablature — with the lute as indications of string and fret, with keyboard instruments in the German-speaking area as letters with value signs placed above. The voice-leading can no longer be read off consistently there: individual notes may be dropped if they cannot be grasped, others are transposed by an octave. The texture is also often ornamented — runs, figurations, and broken chords appear at places where the model had long note values.
Musical use
Intabulations belong to the core stock of lute and keyboard music of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. They were the way in which widespread chansons, madrigals, and motets reached domestic music-making, and at the same time a school of the art of ornamentation: how a player embellished a familiar model was a matter of comparison and competition. For research they are doubly valuable, because they give information on performance practice — they show what was actually played, not only what was composed.
The intabulation is to be distinguished from the mere transcription into modern notation, which adds nothing, and from the arrangement in the present-day sense, which adapts a work for another scoring without changing the type of notation.
Performance practice
If you play an intabulation, look, if possible, at the vocal model: it shows which line is the main voice and where the cadences lie — both easily disappear from view in tablature. Lead the voices on deliberately, even where notes are missing; the ear supplements what the hand cannot grasp. Do not take the ornamented places faster than the harmony carries.