Martina Rosenberger wrote: > Hallo > > my brother-in-law sent me this article from Oxford University Press:
Very interesting article. Thank you Martina. The article is very informative and seems for the most part well founded. There are a few details there I'd take with a grain of salt, but I'll leave them for now. ;-) > > Read the last few lines: Is this your opinion, too? > > There is no explanation for the thesis that the English Guittar should > not be called a cittern...... Seems to me the author actually actually gives three reasons: 1) It's played with fingers not with a plectrum. I suppose that distinction must also be valid the other way, that is a guitar played with a plectrum isn't really a guitar. (If we want to be really nasty we can of course also ask what we should call an instrument kept in a museum and never played at all neither with plectrum nor fingers. ;-) 2) It's not tuned as a cittern. Which tunings are "true" to the cittern and which aren't are far from clear though. Again it's tempting to draw a parallel to the modern guitar. Is a guitar tuned as a renaissance lute still a guitar? How about other alternative guitar (or perhaps I should say "guitar") tunings? Which ones are true guitar tunings and which magically transforms the instrument into something completely different? 3) There are some structural differences. That is actually a valid point. But only if we first define which construction details are characteristic for a cittern, something the author seems to have neglected to do. It's especially notable that the author seems more than willing to include the Italian chitarra (I assume he means the chitarra battente, not the "regular" renaissance guitar) in the cittern family while he excludes the English guittar. Classifying musical instruments is not an exact science, and any classification system must necessarily be based on a number of subjective choices. It seems the author of this article tries to present his opinions as The Truth, and that is never a good thing to do. Frank Nordberg http://www.musicaviva.com http://www.tablatvre.com http://www.mandolin-player.com To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
