> The whole point of having an instrument tuned to an open chord is that it > supplies a strong tonic, or home key.
this is fundamental in the understanding of how to play > these instruments. This is the key to the magic.. > > This is why almost all the guittars (maybe all of them?) have holes for > capos. Well�.I�m not so sure about all this. This reply is in the spirit of respectful disagreement, of course. (Actually it�s more fun to read a tirade of insults, so imagine a more colourful version of the previous sentence.) A simpler explanation for capo holes (to transpose) is sheer convenience. It makes it very easy. I�ve spent the last year or so (in an amateur way, admittedly) looking into the chordally tuned Russian guitar. True, this is music from about 1800 and later, and it�s for an instrument with single, gut strings. But the tuning is the same - with (crucially) an added seventh course. I�ve looked at and had a go at playing hundreds of pieces. The repertoire, I would guess, is many, many times greater than that of the guittar (excluding those little transposed-to-C pieces that append other music of the time in Britain). I think Russian semistrunniks would be surprised at your view that �those composers who wrote more adventurous (key wise) music did not really get the best out of the instrument.� The Russian repertoire uses a range of keys. G major, the home key, is used a lot but other keys like C and D and more remote keys are not at all uncommon. And this is in highly sophisticated music which is almost obsessed with the tuning and its possibilities (and meticulously notating these possibilities). What is really interesting, though, is the use of minor keys. Looking, arbitrarily, through about 50 or so pieces by Markov just now, more than half are in minor keys. That�s probably higher than normal but there really are lots of minor key settings. This is very different from the guittar repertoire. There are pieces in D minor and A minor � not too �dissonant� to the open G tuning. B minor is used a lot more than E minor, perhaps because the minor third of B minor is in the tuning. But more common still are the keys of G minor and C minor. The really lugubrious Russian tunes are very often in these keys and the flats of these keys are quite distant from the open G tuning. It�s not even particularly easy to play chords of G minor and C minor. I have no idea what these old tunes in G minor or C minor mean to Russians but they have an almost spine-tingling effect (for the player, anyway). The G tuning is just a tuning. It has all sorts of possibilities beyond diatonic G major. Passages in C minor occasionally crop up in the guittar repertoire, maybe as a section of a rondo. Sounds surprisingly good to me there too. ----------------------------------------- Email sent from www.ntlworld.com virus-checked using McAfee(R) Software visit www.ntlworld.com/security for more information To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
