Dear bill, Just a few final comments on your final comments.
> 2 - one of the luthiers who responded privately said > the term vihuela and guitar were interchangeable > terms > in south america and in the case of argentina, > vihuela > meant guitar right until the end of the 19th cent.. A name is not the instrument,and in this case this is quite clear: Spanish sources from the late sixteenth century and seventeenth and eighteenth show that the baroque guitar (whose proper name at the time was "Guitarra espa�ola") was also called "vihuela". Thus, the interchangeability of terms dates from the early times of the baroque guitar, and this flexible usage was also imported to America. Don�t trust a 17th- or 18th- century source (even less those from the 19th or 20th centuries) that mentions a "vihuela" to mean a sixteenth century vihuela, the most probable interpretation is that it refers to a guitar (baroque or otherwise) > a - i think we have a genuine, living/breathing, > doing-quite nicely-after-400-years-thank-you, > musical > dinosaur in the charango. if consensus will allow > it, > it could be used to accompany any sort of early > music > and still be considered historically correct. What you�ve got with the charango is an adaptation, using local "materials" of the instruments imported by the Spanish. I would hesitate, lacking evidence about the time when it came into use, to consider its use as "historically correct", On the other hand, its technique could teach us much about Baroque rasgueado performance practice - an issue I personally consider more interesting than finding out if it was Pizarro who started chasing armadillos, and which has not been mentioned yet. > i carry an illustration of a charango-like > instrument > from "cantigas de santa maria" with me when we > perform. it's only happened twice but when people > insist that my instrument isn't medieval, i feel bad > showing them up. The fact that some instrument in the Cantigas illustrations resembles a charango does not mean it depicts it. In all probablility its shape and size were not the product of a certain design, but of the possibilities afforded by the "material", meaning which armadillo the maker was able to hunt. Taking into account other facts; its re-entrant tuning, playing technique and musical function, what you got here is most probably the offshoot of a Baroque instrument - I've never heard of a charango used to play monophonic lines with a plectrum, which would be the medieval usage (and I should add that there are certain popular instruments still played in this fashion, but that is another matter altogether). > 1 - the sort of charango i'm talking about is made > of > wood - in a stab at versimilitude, mine was made > with > wooden tuning pegs. those made from armadillo > shells > are genuine south american curios and personally, i > think they're ghoulish and undesireable. My own charango is deeply offended at these comments .. Best regards, Antonio _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Informaci�n de Estados Unidos y Am�rica Latina, en Yahoo! Noticias. Vis�tanos en http://noticias.espanol.yahoo.com
