[CITTERN] Re: Preston tuner history

[Stuart Walsh]

Don't know why this turned up on the vihuela list! This is a second 
attempt to send it to the citttern list.

Alexander Batov wrote:


There is even more to the story. I came across a number of French 
cistres
(some with seven-courses) which had watch key tuners without Preston 
mark on
them. Were they copied after Preston's, smuggled out of England and
rebranded ...? I very much doubt it.

Apart from one puzzling cistre in the V&A, it looks to me that there 
was a guittar (English guitar) fad in Britain that then spread to 
France and the Low Countries. Guittars and music appear in Britain 
from the 1750s and start to appear in France a decade or so later. The 
guitharre angloise - tuned in C - is mentioned by Joseph Carpentier in 
1770 (who evidently disliked the pitch at C). Pieces  from the guittar 
repertoire published in Britain are sometimes ripped off and appear 
anew in (later) French publications with the French preferred tuning 
of a modified A chordal tuning.

So there really does seem a direction of influence from Britain to 
France. From a French perspective, they picked up an inconsiderable 
instrument from Britain and made it  into  something more tolerable!
So, the British use of watch keys - and metal tuners - would 
understandably be taken up by the French too.


Stuart
Even the instruments themselves could
have been made earlier than those with Preston branded tuners.

PS disclaimer: I'm not trying to steal the invention out of Preston's 
hand;
he was a nice guy and made great English guittars. I'm only figuring out
where the idea could have come from.

Alexander



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