Looking for renaissance pieces for my tenor guitar

[Gotterdamerung]

I'd like to learn a few (roughly) renaissance era songs for my gdae tenor guitar. Any suggestions?

[Martin Jonas]

There are lots of public domain sources out there, polyphonic music (for ensemble playing) as well as monophonic music (single melody lines suitable for solo playing).

I attach two PDFs of solo melodies:

The first I have had stashed on my hard disk for a few years -- these are some renaissance and medieval tunes reduced to their lead melodies and therefore suitable for solo playing. Most should work just fine on your tenor guitar. These are from all sorts of sources, mostly very well known in early music circles so you should find lots of recorded examples on Youtube.

The second is a bit more specialised: it's a full modern transcription of the 16th century Skene manuscript, one of the main sources of Scottish renaissance lute tunes. These were originally intended for mandore (a type of five-string soprano lute, effectively a precursor of the mandolin), and will work just fine on tenor guitar give or take a few double stops. I made this PDF myself from image files salvaged from a now long-defunct website of old Scottish music.

Another suggestion would be Oswald's 12 Divertimenti for English guittar (a type of 18th century citterns). They are in their original key of C major at John Goodin's website here:

http://www.mandotopia.com/oswald/oswald12.htm

For GDAE tenor guitar you may prefer them in different keys -- John has also edited these tunes for a Mel Bay book, optimised for GDAE instruments.

Good luck!

Martin

[Gotterdamerung]

Thanks for this resource--I appreciate it.