Now you know the joke. You can have hours of fun by guessing exactly what "relatively small size" makes a theorbo a "toy" under Martin's criteria, then changing the assumed pitch level and doing it again. Martin misses the fun because he doesn't acknowledge that pitch is relevant to the question of instrument size, which spares him a lot of work with the more advanced branches of mathematics, such as multiplication and division.
The part about Martyn's view of what size theorbos I "favor" -- as if I actually had theorbo preferences based on size, and there were someone else on the planet who cared what those preferences were -- is new, I think, and is silly without being funny. As far as I can tell, if Martyn thought about such things, he would say my theorbo is a toy at A92, definitely not a toy at AD0, and probably not a toy at AA5, before realizing that there was something wrong with his categorical one-size-fits-all construct. But he doesn't think of such things. Hence the joke. The fact is, I was taught in early adolescence that size doesn't matter. On Feb 16, 2009, at 11:10 AM, Martyn Hodgson wrote: > A small theorbo is called a 'toy' theorbo when, because of its > relatively small size which only really requires the first > course to be > at the lower octave, the second is also unnecessarily lowered: > it's > all down to how the individual player strings it, not some > inherent > characteristic of the instrument itself. Why some players do it > is a > mystery; although, of course, the use of modern overwpound > strings (if > you like them) allows a fairly strong bass even with a small > fingered > string length. I believe Howard Posner favours these small > instruments > in such a tuning - hence his advocacy of them I presume. There > is much > more, with historical evidence etc, in the archives of this list. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
