On Jul 2, 2011, at 8:36 AM, David van Ooijen wrote: > ...I fail to see why we should stop at holding an > instrument that looks like a lute, and not care about how it sounds. > Art is a personal expression of universal value, but Western art music > is rather coded. I believe that for a player it helps to understand > the coding to play the music more convincingly. The sound is part of > the coding.
I agree Absolutely. Each genre of music has its own characteristic "sound," and each individual performer has his or her own individual "sound." Also, each individual performer is capable of playing either with a purely intellectual approach (stick-to-the-script, no self indulgent messing around, just play what the composer wrote) or an interpretative approach that says that composers are nothing without performers to interpret their music. One strives for an integration of these two approaches. Something else, too: the "sound" of historical music involves taking a good historical copy of an instrument, and finding that instrument's best "voice." That's my answer to "what's the point...?" of playing the lute. The point is to discover, to the best of one's ability, just what the lute is capable of. That certainly narrows the field of enquiry: one goes for the best the lute can do, and assumes that the "old ones" were also doing that. DR -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
