Re Luca Pianca's single-strung liuto attiorbato in A, Bruno asks: > Is there any advantage on playing such an instrument in Vivaldi?
I suspect the primary advantage of a small instrument is that it's easy to travel with it. But in late baroque music, where the continuo lines tend to lie higher than in earlier music, an archlute in A has a minor advantage over a G instrument, at least in execution. Whether having one more note at the top is worth the loss of resonance from the smaller string mass is another question. On Nov 13, 2007, at 6:40 PM, David Tayler wrote: > Though people debate this issue, liuto in Scarlatti Vivaldi land > generally meant mandolin, you can read Tylers book for the different > tunings, I use 6 double courses. I believe this is dated, or perhaps just backward. Tyler will tell you that there was no soprano "liuto" in Italy, and when Vivaldi wanted mandolino he wrote "mandolino." And I believe Vivaldi's "liuto" parts contain continuo parts in the tutti sections (Malipiero left these parts out of his landmark Vivaldi edition), written in bass clef, which would be silly for a mandolino. There's no reason not to think that when Vivaldi wrote "liuto" he meant "archlute," which is what Zamboni meant by "leuto" in 1750 and what Gianoncelli meant when he titled his 1650 archlute collection "Il Liuto." -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
