On Friday, Oct 13, 2006, at 10:08 America/Los_Angeles, Craig Allen wrote: > There seems to be a strong division over the reasons why theorbos are > tuned re-entrantly. One side says it has to do with string tension, > string length, and breakage, while the other school maintains it is > for purely tonal reasons, better chording and so forth.
The original question was ambiguous. If the question is "why did someone come up with a re-entrant theorbo in the first place?" it's not unreasonable to suppose that physical necessity had something to do with it. If the question is "why did the re-entrant theorbo become a standard instrument for 150 years?" the answer has to have more to do with musical taste. I'd think the best answer is the obvious one: players liked the possibilities of a instrument that had five adjacent notes on open frettable strings, an instrument that could be a combination lute and harp, and which had a good many notes in more than one convenient place on the fingerboard, which allows the player to choose the location to suit temperament or context. Read through Castaldi's solo music and you hardly need to ask the purpose of re-entrant tuning. Consider that guitars at the same time usually had some sort of re-entrant tuning, though physical necessity was not an issue. It was perfectly possible to tune most guitars exactly like the top five strings of a modern instrument, but you'd miss all the neat campanile effects. Consider too that d minor tuning also allows for limited harp effects, and German baroque lute is full of opportunities to let adjacent notes (of the scale) ring against other. HP To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
