--- Monica Hall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I would suggest that you start off first and > foremost by asking what would > work in practice with the kind of strings which > might have been available in > the 17th century. >
This is the elephant in the room, though! With all due respect to the researchers and excellent practical string makers active today, our knowledge of exactly how gut strings where made is incomplete. Since many of the procedures entailed in making any particular type of string were special to a specific region, and since large portions of this knowledge was kept a closely guarded secret from their own contemporaries by the guilds and master/apprentice relationship even in the ancient days, we may never know exactly what gut strings were capable of. Endeavoring to speculate on the stringing - and, by extension in this case, the implied character of the music itself - based upon our modern reconstructions of early strings is an extremely dangerous enterprise. Such speculations are valuable only so much as they offer possibilities, not absolutes. We have to be careful of making the tautological declaration that the pyramids can't possibly exist because we have no recorded evidence that all the technology to build them was available at the time. Chris > This is surely the reason why the 1st and 2nd > courses on the theorbo were > tuned down an octave - at least that is what I have > always understood. > Tuning them to the upper octave was incompatible > with the string length. > > You seem to be suggesting that instrumental music > was still essentially the > same as vocal music in the 17th century but surely > the whole point is that > instruments have their own idioms which reflect what > they are capable of. > They don't simple imitate vocal music - even when > they are accompanying it. > > Have you ever tried singing Bach's unaccompanied > violin sonatas? Or John > Bull's keyboard music? > > Monica > > > > > To get on or off this list see list information at > http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html > ____________________________________________________________________________________ Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your home page. http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs
