Se io m'accorgo ben mio d'un altro amante—transcribed by Oscar Chilesotti

Se io m'accorgo ben mio d'un altro amante is a lute piece from Da un Codice Lauten-Buch del Cinquecento: Transcrizioni in notazione moderna di Oscar Chilesotti.^[1] I have seen the title of the song translated as “If I am Troubled”, which doesn't seem correct to me. According to my knowledge of Italian it's more along the lines of “If I become aware, my darling, of another lover”.

Although the song can be played without changes on the guitar, some notational improvements and clarifications are necessary to remove ambiguity. I have changed Chilesotti's measure 8 to a first and second ending. Chilesotti's version has the end repeat bar line split the measure in two, creating two partial measures. When you try to play the song that way, it's clearly wrong rhythmically.^[2]

The Chilesotti transcription is in ⁴/₄ time, using mostly whole, half, and quarter notes. As such, it needs to be played at a tempo of about 120 bpm with the quarter note as the beat unit. It's not at all clear that there are four beats in each measure and the piece certainly doesn't feel like an Allegro tempo. I've halved the duration of all of the notes and changed the time signature to ²/₄ at an Adagio tempo. An alternative would have been to keep the note durations unchanged and change the time signature to ²/₂ with the half note as the beat unit. Yet another possibility would have been to halve the note durations and merge adjacent measures, making the time signature ⁴/₄. The thing to remember when consulting Chilesotti's lute transcriptions is that he was working from lute tablature and made his own decisions about what key and time signature^[3] to use. Since he didn't include tempo indications, he didn't always choose the most appropriate beat unit.

In addition to the above changes, I've corrected the duration of some notes to reflect that an open string continues to sound. The only note value I've changed is in measure 26. The low E in that measure is an octave lower than originally written. It's essential that the E sound throughout the entire measure and this change seemed the best approach to accomplish that. Shortening the note, as would be necessary if played on the D string, was unsatisfying. Preserving the note duration by playing it on the A string and moving the rest of the passage higher up the fingerboard didn't produce the desired effect. Substituting the open E string for the note produced the most aurally pleasing result. Finally, I added a slur for the trill in the same measure.