dear roman - thanks for your reply.
i wasn't so much interested in hearing early recordings of the established baroque repertoire (bach, weiss, etc.) but more in hearing what an early, lute like instrument itself might sound like. there must be early kobsa recordings, for example which would give us an idea. maybe this is stupid but by comparing how a ukranian kobsa player from the turn of the last cent. treated his instrument - without, i would assume, any over riding, outside influences from other cultures, radio, etc. - it might be possible to draw conclusions about similar cordophones from the same era and project them all the way back to the baroque and beyond. that's the idea, at any rate. even allowing for poor quality sound and scratchy recordings it might be possible to hear if he was playing near the bridge or away from it; with strings tuned more to one frequency than another. didn't bartok make recordings of folk instruments, cordophones amongst them? for example, on the google early music site, i posted the same query with this address: http://www.cuatro-pr.org/Home/Eng/Instrmus/Instrmnts/Tiples/tiples.htm there's an early recording sample of a tiple from rural puerto rico (sound sample courtesy kacho maldonado, at the bottom of the page) which suggests (to me) that not much has changed with it or the music played on it, for a very, very long time. regards - bill ===== "and thus i made...a small vihuela from the shell of a creepy crawly..." - Don Gonzalo de Guerrero (1512), "Historias de la Conquista del Mayab" by Fra Joseph of San Buenaventura. go to: http://www.charango.cl/paginas/quieninvento.htm ___________________________________________________________ Win a castle for NYE with your mates and Yahoo! Messenger http://uk.messenger.yahoo.com To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
