David,
There is indeed much about this in the archives. However without troubling yourself to trawl these, you will also see from my recent postings that there's absolutely nothing 'wrong' with small theorboes but just that the use of large theorbo tuning (ie double reentrant in A or G) on the smaller instruments does not tally with the historical record (see archives). In fact, in addition to a couple of large theorboes I also have a small theorbo string length 76cm with just the first course an octcve down and this is very suitable for some repertoire (eg especially English early/mid17thC continuo songs - incidentally, if you don't already know it, look at Ramsey's setting of 'In guilty night' [a dialogue between Saul, the witch of endor and Sameul's ghost for tenor, sop, bass and BC] - a wonderful piece which works very well with just the small theorbo - it predates Purcell's more famous setting- sorry for the digression). The small double rentrant french solo instrument you mention was, according to Talbot MS, set at a higher pitch level than the more usual G or A. I know of no evidence that this instrument was used for BC. MH --- On Tue, 17/2/09, David Rastall <[email protected]> wrote: From: David Rastall <[email protected]> Subject: [LUTE] Re: Theorbo by Nic. Nic. B. van der Waals for sale To: [email protected] Cc: "lutelist Net" <[email protected]> Date: Tuesday, 17 February, 2009, 4:53 PM On Feb 17, 2009, at 10:29 AM, Martyn Hodgson wrote: > Pretension: justifiable claim (OED). I'll take that as a "no" to my question. Martyn, I'm not entirely sure what your justification is for advocating large theorbos only. I realize that this has been discussed on the list before, but as I don't want to comb through the archives to find it, perhaps you can enlighten me as to why you think that those who play small theorbos, especially in double reentrant tuning, are all "daft" (perhaps you can also provide an appropriate OED definition of "daft"). We accept the existence of the smaller French solo theorbo, and we know that music designed for double reentrant tuning was written for that instrument. Doesn't that constitute a justifiable claim that it isn't daft to string a French solo theorbo in double reentrant? David R [email protected] -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html --
