Apparently by way of associating a specific historic instrument with a specific tuning, Martyn Hodgson wrote:
> Praetorius, Mace to name but two............. What surviving instrument does Mace describe? What specific measurements associated with what specific tuning does Mace give us? Praetorius' 1620 Theatrum Instrumentorum is an encyclopedic work that shows generic theorbos, not any specific identifiable instrument, but what the heck: Praetorius' Lang Romanische Theorba: Chitarron is 14-course double re- entrant in G, with a length of about 89cm (roughly 3.1 Brunswick Feet multiplied by 28.536cm per BF) for its six fingerboard strings and an extension about twice that. Scaled down for a theorbo in A it would be about 79 cm. Would such an instrument be a toy? Praetorius' Paduanische Theorba is a 16-course instrument, also in G, about 96cm for the eight fingerboard strings, and 128cm on the extension, which goes down to a contra D (i.e. a full octave lower than the ninth course). I'd be interested to know how such low notes at such a short length would work, and how they would balance the long fingerboard strings. The lowest fingerboard string on the Paduan theorbo would have been an E, and thus considerably shorter in relation to its pitch than the lowest G on the fingerboard of the Roman theorbo; to match the pitch/ length proportion of the Roman theorbo's G, the E would need to be about 106cm. Put another way, a theorbo string tuned to A (the sixth course of a theorbo in A) with the same relation of length to pitch as a 96cm E string would be 75cm long. So even the Paduan theorbo has its toyosity problems. Has any such instrument survived? Did anyone else ever mention such a thing? Or was it a short-lived variant? Or was Praetorius' information faulty? And is anyone playing such an instrument now? Praetorius does not mention an absolute pitch level. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
