At 03:00 AM 11/3/2006, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >among the greatest instruments I know of are by Bernd Kresse: >http://www.kresse-gitarren.de/repro_g.html > > >...The Pages model is something between baroque guitar and early romantic >guitar and I assume one needs time to get used to it. The stauffer and >early french models are very much what I like, very decent and "gentle" >and "soft". The Panormo models tend to come closer to the sound of modern >Torres guitars
I wholeheartedly agree with the above. The couple of Kresse's guitars I've encountered were impeccably crafted and had a beautiful voice. Guitars in 6 courses of paired strings weren't particularly long-lived in the grand scheme of guitar and might be a little too specialized an introduction to classical-/romantic-era guitars. You really should play a few before you settle on a model. I think the feel of all these--Germanic, French, and "Spanish" a la Panormo (an Italian family in England)--is very different, and any one style might be better suited to you...but you have to dabble a bit to know. Early Germanic/Viennese guitars often had scale lengths around 60 cm where those in the style of Lacote or Panormo were more typically around 64 cm. By the mid 1800s, Viennese guitars moved to a longer scale and more robust body (not to mention all the 10-string+ contraptions that started to emerge). I perceive a conspicuous absence of Panormo-style guitars amongst professional 19th-c. guitar specialists. In spite of the fact of their obvious existence in the period in question, they do sound very modern, and I think that some players just don't perceive them to have a quaint tone that they would expect of "period." I personally am a great fan of Panormo's work (so is my wife, and she seldom pays attention). Ca. 1830-1900 American guitars are tragically overlooked. I think this, in part, is because the most important player is still a major player and has been so wholly adopted by the steel-string crowd that the "classical" crowd forgets who C.F. Martin was. Martin fans tend to trivialize or quaint-ify the shop's early guitars with the "parlor" moniker. Martin's 1833-ca. 1850 guitars were very much German guitars of very fine quality. Around the mid 1840s-1850, he began hybridizing some of his German-guitar functionality with a more Spanish-style soundbox, fan bracing, etc. He also began experimenting with the famous X brace around this time, but at this early stage, the X brace was very much intended to carry gut. I consider this the origins of a distinctly American "classical" guitar--Martin, Tilton, Hall, Washburn/Lyon & Healy, etc.--that remained popular until Segovia's campaign washed away the memory of all that did not borrow its conceptual origins from Torres. I play two, both around 60-61 cm: a Germanic instrument by the Placht brothers of Pest, Hungary, and a weird folk-art instrument with early X bracing (ca. 1860-70) made in Reynoldsburg, OH. You're welcome to give them a try if we bump into each other any time soon, Chris. You also might want to consider subscribing to and e-mailing <[email protected]> and <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. I don't think Rob MacKillop patrols these lists with much frequency recently. You might want to directly e-mail him too. Best, Eugene To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
