Dear Jon, I thank you for your corrrection, I meant "polemic" as an adjective: "of, relating to, or being a polemic: controversial". It should have been polemical. Now to more interesting bussiness.
--- Jon Murphy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> escribi�: > Antonio, > > With Vance I thank you for the description (and the > drawings I've seen > confirm them). > > But if you will forgive me for correcting your > English (and I only do so as > I prefer to be corrected when I speak in another > language). I don't think > you mean "polemic" when describing the vihuela. > Polemic means "aggressive" > or "attacking", and can be used as a noun (as in "a > polemic") or as an > adjective (as "a polemic speech" - sometimes misused > as "a polemical > speech"). You might mean "generic", as in a word > that refers to a class of > things - or you might mean something else (but your > meaning is clear from > the context). > > But the guitar versus the vihuela raises and > interesting question at to the > form of the music, rather than the form of the > instrument. My source book on > ancient and modern instruments classifies the > vihuela with the guitars, etc. > But notes that it is a guitar shape "tuned as a > lute". Given that the lute > tuning seems to be older (can't prove that, but it > seems to be), then why > did the Spanish change the tuning? (On the > assumption that the "guitar" > tuning is an adaptation). It is a minor change, just > shifting which course > has the "third" step. My guess is that the "guitar > tuning" allowed the left > hand to move as a whole into chording patterns for > polyphony, whereas the > "lute tuning" developed before polyphony. Although I > play both I'm too new > to the lute to answer my question, but the fingering > patterns seem to > suggest that. Comments solicited. > > Best, Jon > Forget about what your book says. The reference to guitar tunings, probably meaning the modern guitar's interval disposition, only serves to confuse the issue. During the sixteenth century both the vihuela and the lute shared a common "tuning" (meaning, precisely, the disposition of the intervals by which the courses were tuned), namely 4th-4th-major 3rd-4th-4th. This can be interpreted as G-C-F-A-D-G, or A-D-G-B-E-A, or E-A-D-F#-B-E, or whatever theoretical tuning you might wish to assume. In actual practice, the real tuning (pitch) was determined by the characteristics of the instrument and its strings; instructions such as: "tune your first string as high as it can withstand it" are fairly common. The 16th-century guitar, on the other hand, had two "tunings": a los viejos (in the old style), with the intervals 5th-major 3rd-4th, and "a los nuevos" (in the new style), with the intervals 4th-major 3rd-4th. One possible interpretation of this tuning could be D-G-B-E. The "guitar (i.e modern guitar)" tuning came into being with the "invention" of the five course guitar, whose nominal tuning was A-D-G-B-E, to which it was later added a sixth course/string, thus completing the tuning used nowadays for the modern guitar. With best wishes, Antonio _________________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Informaci�n de Estados Unidos y Am�rica Latina, en Yahoo! Noticias. Vis�tanos en http://noticias.espanol.yahoo.com To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
