Thank you Alexander, I fear I didn't explain the position clearly enough: what is the historical evidence for your assertions? What evidence do you have that 'musicians bought the strings from the same makers year after year.'
Finally you seem to be confusing the issue of Tension with Stress. Strings will break at the Breaking stress which is a constant for a given material and is independent of the string's diameter for a given pitch and string length. Thus one may have a thick or a thin string on the same instrument and both will break at the same pitch. Thus, without begging the question (ie what tensions were used historically on various lutes), this in itself tells us nothing about the diameter of strings that may have been used. The way in which re-entrant tuning was required by the exigencies of pitch, string length and tensile strength was first described by Piccinini in 1623, later by Mace (1676) and others. MH --- On Fri, 1/4/11, alexander <[email protected]> wrote: From: alexander <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [LUTE] Re: Stability of lute in playing fast. To: "Martyn Hodgson" <[email protected]> Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Date: Friday, 1 April, 2011, 14:39 On Fri, 01 Apr 2011 11:54:25 +0100 (BST) Martyn Hodgson <[1][email protected]> wrote: > Thank you for this. > > Well, without wanting to be pedantic I think we need to ask: what evidence do you have that 'The top string was made from the same number of guts while the mensura increased'? The smallest number of guts, two, arranged thin end to thick end for evenness. There was no use of splitting horn, and no polishing the top string, to keep it strong. Such a string comes out to about .43 mm, according to E. Segermann. I recall P. O'Dette describing his idea of reentrant tuning creation - lute longer - top string the same. Lutanist trying to tune it up to where it is supposed to be - damn! snap! Oh well, let's tune it an octave lower. Humorous, yes, but very true. Can not argue with the calculator and material physics. Sorry. The tension is directly proportional to the string length and the pitch. > Moreover, even if the highest pitched string of, say, a large bass lute with string length of, say, 95cm had the same number of gut filaments as that of a small lute, say string length 55cm, which I very much doubt, the width of each gut filament/strand might well not be the same. TO avoid unpredictable variations in gut quality, musicians bought the strings from the same makers year after year. The splitting horn was invented only in the 18th century. This restricted the possible variations on the thinnest strings up to that point (and after...). > > I'm aware of Mimo Peruffo's excellent work on historical strings but I think even he would admit that there's still much to be done and to determine. The relationship between violin strings and strings for the guitar clearly depends on the size of violin strings; but there is still no concencus on early 19th century violin stringing. Indeed, as has been suggested, it's likely that earlier national preferences continued, so that string sizes varied significantly accross Europe. Earlier, the fragmentary record of Stradivari's strings tells us that a simple equivalence with violin strings was only approximate and I see no reason to think it became permanently fixed to the sizes you suggest were standard in the early 19th century. In any event, as explained above, the number of guts and resulting string diameter depends on the sizes to which the individual guts are split - we cannot assume the strands were all of a near uniform size; indeed I'd think > this most unlikely. > > Incidentally, typical sizes for early 19th century guitars indicate a smaller string length than you think: in the range 60 - 64cm for the majority of extant instruments. An instrument with a string length of 69cm is most unusual - could you kindly let us have some further details? My apologies, my interest in 19th century guitars is long gone. The lack of time reduces the interest even farther. 685 mm is the longest guitar from circa 1810s i have measured, from collection of Leningrad Museum of musical instruments (in 1970s). 635 mm as far as i remember were more often the case, with some from 65 to 67 cm. Then, the ladies, or terz-guitars, quite a bit shorter and smaller. The younger guitar loving people should be the ones concerned with this though... > > MH > -- References 1. http://uk.mc263.mail.yahoo.com/mc/[email protected] To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
