Stewart McCoy at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > As often as not, transposing the voice part to match a lute in G > brings the singer's notes into a sensible range. For example, airs > de cour which imply a lute in A tend to have quite a high range. By > transposing down a tone for the sake of a lute in G, you avoid those > horrible high squeeky notes like top g" and a".
French pitch always tended to be low, and at least by the late 1600's Parisian pitch was a whole tone lower than A=440, which is to say a lute in A would have been, in modern terms, a lute in G. HP
