I've just received my copies of a new book about historical citterns and guitars: Gitarre und Zister, edited by Monika Lustig. Although the title is in German, most of the articles are in English. It presents papers given at a 2001 conference at the Michaelstein Kloster. I've written to Monika about how to order it, in case any of you are interested, but maybe Rob already knows? Both Rob and myself have articles in the volume; about half the articles are about citterns, the rest about guitars, up to and including 1800.
Rob, I enjoyed your contribution very much and I wanted to ask you a question about the Oswald duets for two guittars or mandelins. I'm curious about what you know about mandolins in Scotland. As Oswald was a cellist, he may have known something about the violin, and thus the new and fashionable Neapolitan mandolin. Do you think that with the pieces in G and D, for example, he was thinking more about mandolin than different sized or capoed guittars? Another idea that has crossed my mind is how having pretty much all guittar music in C is almost like having it in tablature, if you play more or less in first position. In fact, I read Marella's guittar music, which is written mostly in A (as he favored his guittar tuned in A) as if it were written with a bass clef, giving me C. At the same time that publishers were transposing just about every popular song of the day into C for the guittar, they were putting many in D for the German flute. These two instruments could play together if the guittarist capoed up, but one could also tune up to flute pitch as well. Just an idea. Doc To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
