Howard is right - I was making assumptions about 17th C strings (that
their breaking pitch was roughly the same as modern gut strings, for
which issue I refer you to Mimmo) but even if their strings were much
stronger, we still have to contend with the tension problem - just how
tight can you stand your trebles? Without having my string calculator
handy, I guesstimate a tension of at least 45 Newtons for a .42mm gut
string tuned to g' at a'=440 on a string length of 67cm - and of course
twice that for a double string (though I think the double top string is
a feature of the first type of archlute rather than the second (see
below), if the surviving instruments are anything to go by).
The issue about "archlutes" with shorter string lengths is muddying the
waters a bit - I was assuming that everyone accepted a differentiation
(dating right back to Robert Spencer's paper in 1976) between "liuti
attiorbati" (surviving examples from Venice c.1630s and 40s with string
lengths as short as 58cm and presumably intended for solo music) and
"continuo archlutes" (dates variable but somewhat later and tending to
Roman origin like the Harz, and presumably the continuo instrument
specified by Corelli and Handel) which I took to be the focus of
discussion. By the way, as I remember the Harz is roughly the size we
were talking about (is it 69cm rather than 67? I can't remember) rather
than hugely bigger.
Martin
On 07/10/2010 16:53, howard posner wrote:
On Oct 7, 2010, at 6:55 AM, Martin Shepherd wrote:
17th C archlutes were indeed about 67cm string length and used gut strings for
which the highest practical pitch was about a'=392 or possibly lower. It
follows that the ensembles in which they played must have used these low
pitches.
This makes assumptions about 17th-century gut strings, and ignores surviving
17th-century archlutes shorter than 67cm.
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