Huh. Removing 11 strings. Going all gut. So you're downsizing, going
organic, and eliminating redundancy? How very 2009!!
~Dale's Muse
On Mon, Oct 26, 2009 at 5:27 PM, Dale Young <[1]dyoung5...@wowway.com>
wrote:
There is the litho of the greatest lutenist/composer ever, Adam
Falckenhagen with his lute. I had always contented myself that the
draughtsman had just omitted all of the "redundant" strings for
clarity. It clearly depicts a 13 STRING instrument. I am willing to
let go of this dogmatic stance and admit that there may, might,
could have been a desire not only for clarity and simplicity in
musical structure, but also in tone colour, also facilitating, to a
degree, dynamic and lyrical expression. Ornamental notes, that
became more integral in Galant era music, may be easier and/or more
expressive on a single string. Again, Hagen's melodies, for one,
extended far south of the 2nd course.
I have thought that, as the solo lute, per se, lost "popularity"
it became an adjunct to the bread and butter, accompaniment theorbo
or theorbo-lute played by professionals. Theorbos have a long
history of single stringed-ness, thus I can perceive an unadvertised
lightening 'o' the tension. But if the poison was in my chalice....
----- Original Message ----- From: "wikla" <[2]wi...@cs.helsinki.fi>
To: "BAROQUE-LUTE" <[3]baroque-l...@cs.dartmouth.edu>
Sent: Monday, October 26, 2009 5:13 PM
Subject: [BAROQUE-LUTE] Re: B-lute 6th course, with octave or no?
Thanks to everyone,
it became a very interesting conversation if this topic!
I tried a more proper stringing (but sorry, only by synthetic strings
that
I happened to have!) to the M. Hoffmann I borrowed from E. Palviainen.
The
basses with octaves were very strong -- and all of the instrumet became
_very_ galant, very much more as an instrument of early classism than
late
baroque -- well, there really is not much difference there, is there...
Anyhow the instrument really was useless in French baroque lute music,
not
to speak of the music for accords nouveaux... Of course it wasn't
useful, I
did not expect that, but I did not imagine it is that much different an
animal!
Then I tried single stringing without any octaves anywhere. Quite
interesting... ;-) Like a better "classical guitar"... So my next
question
(hopefully conversation generating...;-) is: Were there any galant
period
lutenists, who went to single strings? I guess there were! Any known
history of 13 string (not course) lutes before the Swedish lute (end of
18th century?), which I think was single strung?
All the best,
Arto
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References
1. mailto:dyoung5...@wowway.com
2. mailto:wi...@cs.helsinki.fi
3. mailto:baroque-lute@cs.dartmouth.edu
4. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
