A dancer I was once acquainted with used to expound on what he called "the myth of radial symmetry" in regard to the human body. The body *looks* symmetrical, but inside, most of the vital organs are on one side or the other. And if you take function into account, almost nothing is symmetrical. The right and left hands work differently, and we are all either right or left handed, footed, eyed and eared. The right and left halves of the brain work differently. The more highly developed we become, the more pronounced these differences are. The more your personality develops the less symmetrical your facial expressions are. So in nature, symmetry is a starting point, not a goal.
And so it is, I think with musical instruments. The more they develop, the more suited to function they become, the less symmetrical they are. If you started with the simplest wind instrument you'd have a tube with a straight line of holes, and the first thing you'd want to do to make it more functional would be to stagger the holes to conform to the hand to make it easier to play. By the time you get to the modern transverse flute, symmetricality is long gone. The lute started out fairly symmetrical in the mediaeval period, like the oud, but as time went on, inner bracing got changed around, the neck cocked to one side, bass riders and such were added... the highly developed instruments that Weiss would have played were nothing like symmetrical. So, I wonder about the Stradivarius template... could it have also been a starting point? An attempt to revitalize the lute by taking it back to an earlier time? - Carl Donsbach To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
