I am conducting an intensive research project into the early history of fretted instruments and their role in the development of music itself.
I am examining surviving instruments, manuscripts, tablatures, tunings, construction techniques, and the music written for them, looking for evidence of how musicians and composers experimented with musical ideas.
What I instinctively thought—and am increasingly finding—is that these instruments were not simply vehicles for music conceived elsewhere. They were places of experimentation: laboratories for harmony, counterpoint, harmonic movement, cadences, sequences, bass patterns, chordal structures, and more.
In some cases, the music seems to explore ideas that music theory would only later explain and formalize. The instrument and its repertoire appear to be leading the theory rather than simply following it.
Yet the role these instruments and the musicians who played them had in the development of music itself has largely been overlooked.
The evidence is there, often hiding in plain sight.
I am following it wherever it leads.