On Jun 27, 2011, at 4:34 PM, Leonard Williams wrote: > This discussion of breaking pitch has me wondering: Knowing the breaking > pitch of gut, can we use the rule of tuning a treble to just below breaking > pitch to determine at about what pitch lutes were tuned historically?
Not really. You'd have to know the nominal pitch of a lute, the mensur, the local pitch standard, and the the thickness of its treble string. There is no historical lute about which we know those four things (three of which may well have changed over its useful life). You'd also have to take the instruction to tune to just before it breaks literally (which makes some of us giggle) and assume that everyone followed it (and there are instructions that say something different, and make more sense). And if you knew nominal pitch, local pitch, length and thickness of lute X in location X, you'd have to assume that the breaking point of a string available to player X in place X was the same as what we find with modern strings. And then all you'd get is a range of possible pitches. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
