>From Oliver Webber, who is not on this list: Begin forwarded message:
> here's David Tayler's response below, with my comments pasted in in bold. > Thanks very much for your help! > > Oliver > > From David Tayler, March 26th (IIRC) > > Yes, I know of just a few in Europe who are doing this. I'm not sure > I would say "quite a few", it is still rare, especially here in the US. It's probably worth distinguishing between "all gut", which has a much more limited application, and "equal tension", which can include wound strings, but which also generally implies the use of much thicker gut strings, and can be applied up to 1760 or so. In the UK, playing with equal tension (or near-equal - there are some live debates about the distinction between equal feel and equal tension) is quite common; in continental Europe there are only a few ensembles who do this (De Swaen in Amsterdam, and recently one of the big French orchestras (I forget which) strung up in this way for a project), but it is gaining popularity. > There are some nice pictures on the website of relative string sizes. > I prefer Mimmo's gallery of the originals, but it is good to compare what we > are using with what they had back then. Definitely! > I would slightly differ, or amplify, on the statement about some musicians > using all gut in the 18th century--it is instrument > specific. Mea culpa - I should have written "violinists"... > On the violin, all gut, unwound strings were the standard > into the late 19th century, and even the early 20th century. ..but I wouldn't go that far. There is said to be a rogue piece of evidence for all-gut violin stringing from c.1850, but if it exists (I haven't seen it) it is most definitely an exception. Every other source I have seen from the 1780s onwards gives a wound G string as the only possibility. Gut D strings, on the other hand, were in common use until after the 2nd world war, even though some violinists had abandoned them in the 20s and 30s. But the wound G has been the uncontested standard at least since the 1780s and probably a little earlier. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
