Anthony, I am afraid you over interpreted my statement. Actually I wasn't really 100% serious writing it - maybe half serious.....or so. But obviously there is some truth in every joke. How can we say things for 100% if we lack convincing evidence? As I said we have variety of strings at our disposal, we have technologies that were unconceivable for the old ones and whether we use them or not is a matter of taste I suppose. I may like plain gut, somebody else may prefer loaded strings.....fine! Let's make music! The public will asses what sounds good. But we should make a living music of our days (don't get me wrong again - I am not saying that the history doesn't matter, no, no). This is however not a museum of the dead music - musical fossils. We use the new historical findings to make us aware of how this music could really sound some hundreds years ago, but I think this is not a musical attitude to see somebody's performance only in a historical context. We have only hypothesis now. So presumably someone believes that the loaded strings really existed. But what will happen if somebody else proves they never ever existed? Shall we classify somebody's performance as not HIP and in consequence not worthy listening? As an example do listen to Magdalena Kozena singing Haendel aria "Oh! Had I Jubal's Lyre" and then interpretation of the same piece by Victoria de los Angeles (both on Youtube). One is more or less historically correct the other not so. But what would you like to listen to? Probably each one of us would answer differently. And this shows that historical correctness is not the most important factor in music making (I stress it - not the MOST important). This is why I said - let's make music!!! Now, back to the strings. I really have a big esteem for people that make a painstaking efforts in order to recreate the facts from the past. Nevertheless many questions still wait for answering. Meanwhile I wouldn't hesitate to get the best sounding strings for my lute. And this "BEST SOUNDING" probably will mean something different for each of us.
Best wishes Jaroslaw -----Original Message----- From: Anthony Hind [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, June 07, 2008 3:53 PM To: damian dlugolecki; lute@cs.dartmouth.edu Net Subject: [LUTE] Re: dyeing/loading I can understand some lutists considering the historic question unimportant. I am thinking of what Jaroslaw said in an earlier message. Indeed, Charles Besnainou told me he set out simply to improve on present strings with no care whatsoever about historical correctness. He found that wirewounds drowned the midrange and impeded the resonances at the bridge. He found that twisted gut and Pistoys at equal tension have poor high frequency performance (inharmonicity) and set out to solve that problem. I saw and heard spectrograms, of the same diameter string, hightwist plain-gut, Pistoy, and his own toroidal string, and you can observe and hear the difference in the high frequency behaviour of these strings. The worst spectrogram is given by the high twist and the best by his own strings the Pistoy in between. It seems that inharmonicity is related to loss of flexibility at the nut and at the bridge. Briefly the ripples of the sound waves encounter impedance and some return, out of phase. These out of phase returning waves, rapidly cancel the high frequency content and damp the wave (sorry, you will all be able to find fault in my explanation which is really a metaphor). I imagine that dropping the tension of the hightwist string is going to lower that impedance and improve its behaviour (low tension theory). I do not know whether, Charles made comparisons of the same string types at varying tensions. This could be very interesting. Anyway, Charles actually thought he had discovered something completely new, but then discovered that such ropes had existed, and had been used on musical instruments. When trying to solve a particular problem, we are highly likely to find that the ancients were confronted with the same problems, and came up with similar if slightly different solutions. Nevertheless, for Charles the historic question remains quite secondary, and most of the ropes he now makes are in pure carbon. I still would prefer the gut ones, but his approach, open to history, but also applying science to find new solutions, may make it possible for synthetics users to stop using wirewounds. I for one am not against that. I don't see any terrible problem in these different approaches coexisting, and musicians making the best of the string types that result from this. Let us not even want to close off some axis of discussion, because it is different from our own. Now whether, it is better to pick up one's lute and to play instead of discussing, is quite another question, and I think that is what I am juts about to do. regards Anthony To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
