Andrew Rutherford wrote:
Here's the quote from Hintz, from the Public Advertiser, Mar 17, 1766:
"that he has, after many Years Study and Application in endeavouring
to bring this favourite Instrument the Guittar (being the first
Inventor) still to a greater perfection in regard to tuning and
keeping the same in Tune, which has always been a principal Defect as
well as inconvenient, has now found out, on a Principal entirely new,
several Methods, whereby it is much easier and exacter tuned, and also
remains much longer in Tune than by any Method hitherto known."^53
I fished this out of Lanie Graf's article. He's talking about his new
tuning machine but doesn't explain how it works. ( People have noted
that 1766 seems rather late to be inventing a tuning machine for the
guittar; that Preston had already been there. Do we know that for
certain?)
Anyway, he throws in parenthetically that he was "it's first inventor"
It's interesting that ' a principal defect' is that it's hard to get
(and keep) these things (EGs) in tune. I'd certainly agree! Some
instruction books just offer a tuning fork method (and go on to say that
nothing could be easier). Your quote suggests that keeping EGs in tune
is a problem too whereas it's usually trotted out that wire-strung
instruments easily keep their tuning. (I think this is partly true only.)
Why would 1766 be late for a tuning machine? The EG was new in the
1750s. Tuning mechanisms are a completely new invention. It's a
generalisation but weren't all plucked instruments tuned by pegs until
the EG (emerging in the 1750s)?
Stuart
On Wed, Aug 19, 2009 at 4:52 PM, Stuart Walsh <s.wa...@ntlworld.com
<mailto:s.wa...@ntlworld.com>> wrote:
Andrew Rutherford wrote:
Re the cittern and the Moravians, Lanie Graf published
something in a
recent Moravian Archives journal all about citterns,
Moravians and
Frederick Hintz, the furniture maker turned guittar maker.
You can
find the relevent (sp?) info on her ning page.
By the way, Hintz claimed to have "invented" the English
guitar. I
think he may have invented the major-chord tuning for the
cittern when
he moved to England... andy r
Andy
What is the reference for the claim by Hintz, that he invented the
English guitar? And what date?
I think the chordal tuning may well pre-date the 1750s. But
definitely something happened in Britain the 1750s.Well lots of
things happened then - but in the world of citterns. Several
contemporary accounts describe the (English) guitar/guittar as
new or newly introduced, and, as far as I know, no instruments
and no publications date from before the 1750s. And the typical
(English) guitar/guittar has a chordal tuning, on six courses of
wire strings with the top four courses paired and the bottom two,
single. As far as I know, no cittern with that tuning and
stringing arrangement exists before the 1750s. And the instrument
tended to be called a guitar/guittar and the music is not in
tablature.
I've tended to suppose that the immediate origin is a four-course
instrument - four pairs of strings, tuned chordally, gceg,
probably German, probably played with the fingers, not a
plectrum.And then someone in Britain, probably in London, added
the two single basses and somehow started a huge fashion for the
instrument among the well-off. So that many, many instruments were
made and lots and lots of music published for the next 20-30+ years.
Maybe Hintz was the man! Maybe he thought of the idea of an
elegant but simple instrument for well-off amateurs. He added two
single basses to extend the range of notes of C major. He
discarded the tablature concept and just had almost everything in
C major. Hintz made instruments, he published some music and, I
can't remember, but perhaps he was a publisher of music too. But
he (or whoever it was) must have had very good connections for the
fashion to take off so well amongst the more well-to-do.
Hintz also published some hymn tunes. I wrote out a few of them
ages ago. They are quite unlike most EG music, three-part block
chords, rather than running single lines. But they're not like the
Moravian choralbuch either.
Stuart.
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