David wrote: > Ron's question, made relevant for the listers, freely translates to > what's the point of playing lute. There is no point, of course, which > is exactly the point. Just a minute, buddy. This kind of 'freely translated' interpretation of someone else's words has led to such disasters as the search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as a justification for attack, and the abstraction of the term 'reverse engineering' to justify the invention of a new instrument to play old music. My point in asking the question, apart from the goal of stimulating discussion, is to prod players into thinking about what they are selling when they play old music. It's fairly obvious that we can't tell exactly what the music sounded like in its time, since there are no surviving audio recordings. But using the evidence that does survive, if re-creating old music as it sounded when it was new is the goal, then making up a new instrument is not going to get us there. If we embrace this 'truth' then we can go about our merry way making music with the authenticity of our own conviction of 'how it goes.' Ron Andrico
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