If we are going to include the English Guittar and Portugese Guittara as
Citterns then I feel we should also include flat-back Mandolas and Mandolins, I
agree. A while back in this discussion somebody put foreward that the common
features of a Cittern were a flattish back and wire strings.
If the above are to hold true, then the awkwardly-named 'Irish Bouzouki' should
also be included as a type of Cittern, shouldn't it ? After all, it is
basically a long-scale Octave Mandola (with the top stings dropped down from E
to D) and has less in common with the Greek Bouzouki that it has different.
I'm not trying to start a flame war here but I think it would help most of us
if we got our terminology sorted out.
Kevin.
Brad McEwen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Doc:
I agree, persoanlly. The easies tthing to do is to consider all of these
instruments (Renaissance, EG, PG, and other variants) as citterns.
Some would consider the instruments that I play (modern "Celtic" citterns) as
10 string mandolas. I prefer the name cittern, myself.
Brad
"[EMAIL PROTECTED]" wrote:
Hi Stuart,
At the risk of repeating myself again (and boring everyone to death):
I think one of the reasons terms other than cittern were used so often is
that the composers were Italian, for
example, so they used the proper word for cittern in their dialect, spelled
in a way they (or the printer) thought fit.
(I've also spent a lot of time (grad, post grad and post doc) at the BL and
several other libraries and archives, as I
think you know.)
Look at a Renaissance guitar, then an 18th-c guitar. Quite a difference,
no? Look at a Renaissance cittern and an
18th-c cittern. Again, quite a difference. Most people have no problem
calling the guitars guitars, so what's the
problem with the citterns? Renaissance-style citterns continued to be made,
and this attests to the popularity and
usefulness of the form. The later style instrument has lasted a rather
long time as well.
I think it's a good idea to keep in mind that cittern, guitar, and the many
variants in other languages, come from a
common root. That doesn't mean the instruments are the same, but that the
words could be interchangeable if
certain distinctions aren't that important (Foucault has some interesting
things to say about this). Rather than
preparing a table showing uses of cittern and similar terms, why not do a
table of guitar tunings used over the
centuries? I don't really think the tuning makes the instrument different.
If I tune my guitar like a lute, it's still a
guitar. (If I tune my orpharion like a bandora, however, things might get a
little tricky.) I say that the Renaissance-
type of cittern is one type of cittern; the EG and PG types are other types
of citterns, as are waldzithers, halszithers,
and several other instruments around the world. Renaissance guitar, Baroque
guitar, guitarra batente, classical,
steel-string, 12-string, archtop, electric (solid, semi-acoustic and
hollow body) are all types of guitar. What is the
problem with having different types of cittern?
I think if we want to get into a philosophical discussion about time's
arrow, or better yet, parallel movement, we'd
better do that on our own.
Ciao,
Doc
--------------------------------------------------------------------
mail2web - Check your email from the web at
http://mail2web.com/ .
To get on or off this list see list information at
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
---------------------------------
Everyone is raving about the all-new Yahoo! Mail.
--
--
