The vast majority of the early lutes had no body frets, and the high notes can be easily and with a nice but distinctively different sound played all the way up the B flat (imaginary fret 15) on the soundboard.. Some lutes either show body frets or curious decorative squiggles, but these are a minority report. We can rule out the orpharion for Neusidler, I think, since it hadn't been invented yet. The anhemitonic principle in fretting is well documented, for some composers, 12 came after 10. If we built the lutes to favor the fretless sound for the high positions, they would produce an even better sound. I suspect they had tastini or "gluons" as well, just for one or two notes. dt
At 05:56 AM 1/27/2009, you wrote: > > >Presumably he didn't have an 11th fret, so his 11th fret is our 12th, > >if you see what I mean. :-) > >Yes, that makes sense, as do the other responses about the reasons that >there might not have been an eleventh fret. Wouldn't that mean all or most >of the lutes at the time all were set up this way? Neusidler would have used >the symbol that would have been useful to the most player, even if his own >lute was idiosyncratic. > >A little later, Molinaro (Fantasia XII, 1599) uses 'X' (ten), 'n' (eleven) >and '13' (thirteen), but I cannot find a twelfth fret marking! Does anyone >know what the 'n' stands for? > > > >To get on or off this list see list information at >http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
