I'm happy to give you my views. Clearly there's no absolutes and national preferences and pitch variations mean no single figure is 'right' in all circumstances: but this, and the use of modern overwound strings, has led to a situation where some are unecessarily stringing small instruments as double re-entrant.
I think we can be pretty certain that any theorbo under, say, 70cm in G or A is not going to require the two highest courses an octave down even at the highest reasonable historical pitch level. Similarly at the opposite end of the scale it's difficult to see that a string length of 99cm could get away with only the first course an octave down even at the lowest historical level. The issue then becomes one of where approximately does one draw the line? The evidence we have is from extant instruments, early depictions and writings and the physical characteristics of gut (for highest pitch for a given string length and lowest pitch for the [gut] basses). From all this I think it unlikely that anything around 76cm or less would need to be double re-entrant at modern/modern 'baroque' pitches (ie A440 or A415). Once double re-entrant becomes necessary, the size can increase significantly to benefit the bass and sizes from the mid 80s (say 86) to low 90s (say 93) are appropriate (or even up to 99cm if you wish). MH --- On Sun, 22/2/09, David Rastall <[email protected]> wrote: From: David Rastall <[email protected]> Subject: [LUTE] Straight Answer Please To: "lute-cs.dartmouth.edu Net" <[email protected]> Date: Sunday, 22 February, 2009, 5:11 PM The current topic under discussion of "toy" theorbos has failed so far to answer the one question without which there is no basis for discussion at all, namely, what size does a theorbo have to be so that it can no longer be called a "toy" theorbo? I request a straight answer, please: no letters in the body of the answer except cm following some numbers. 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 --
