Anthony- Yes- as well as difficulty
compensating for variability of fingering for
correct intonation among differing diameter
strings, particularly thick basses- no matter
what the tuning system.. The tone color is
another point I forgot to mention- it is
different with wooden frets, not always
unacceptable but never an improvement. Having
tied gut 10th frets on my vihuela and my archlute
really feels & sounds right. Can't help out on
the French Baroque, except that the comments you
offer sound about right. The famous portrait of
Charles Mouton, the epitome of a top professional
French lute player- excruciatingly correct in all
its details- exhibits a most definitive absence
of wooden body frets.
Dan
I suppose you are talking about the fact that
the wooden frets are fixed and may not
correspond to the tuning that you are using,
or do you mean that there is a difference of tone with a wooden fret?
When I mentionned Stephen's having set my
Baroque lute in 6th comma, many people here
protested that French Baroque lute must have
been very close to Equal,
and yet Stephen told me that French Baroque
players shunned wooden frets because of their
poor sound. I am now wondering whether this
might imply that they did
vary their tuning, or simply that the sound of a
gut fret and a wooden fret are distinct, and
this was what they disliked, or again simply
theu did not like the extreme high
as they did tend to revel in the mid rather than top or bass.
I would be glad to receive some enlightenment about that.
Anthony
Le 28 janv. 09 à 08:02, Daniel Winheld a écrit :
I once tore the wooden frets off my six-course lute (got sick of bad
intonation with gut midrange & bass strings) and played it that way
for a few years. One soon learns to fret those notes with correct
intonation after a reasonable amount of proper practice, and a whole
new sound register opens up. In fact, with or without body frets I
recommend that all serious lute students- when the general level of
competence permits- should spend time practicing scales & improvised
passagi beyond the frets. One toccata by Piccinini (Posthumous 2nd
volume published in 1639 by his son Leonardo Maria Piccinini) goes to
the 19th semitone- about 1/4" short of the rose on my archlute- and
most of us could certainly go to the 15th semitone. An added bonus
from this practice is fluency within the "standard" one octave
compass. Far too many of us suddenly shut down and stop when sight
reading (duets, for instance) when the action goes beyond the 7th
fret. Beyond the frets, there is neither hemitonic nor anhemitonic; a
liberating tonic to the ear. But you got to learn precision, which
pays dividends.
Dan
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
--
To get on or off this list see list information at
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
--
Rachel Winheld
820 Colusa Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94707
[email protected]
Tel 510.526.0242
Cell 510.915.4276
