> Why would you tell lies to children? Why would you confuse their budding sense > of history?
Why would I? I wouldn't, and I don't think I lied to the kids. Children of about six or seven years usually can't tell a month from thousand months. So, kings and knights and dragons implied something along the lines of back then, long ago. You may expect budding senses of history with children of about twelve years on. I was serious when I wrote you have to focus on your audience. What I tried to make clear, though, was that it's not the audience that shapes my own interest in the lute. Sometimes, people think of what they think is medieval, when they are confronted with lutes. And you'll have to comply somehow with them if you want to get connected, which is crucial for performers (or so I think). And I told the truth when I wrote that I used microphones. I have been doing so for a couple of gigs, and I think, successfully so. There is no point in a lute that you can't hear speaking. Its sound projects quite far, that much is true, but the subtleties of the sound get lost over longer distances. My mom is hearing impaired, so we took our places in the 2nd row at a lute recital a couple of week back. It was in an old chapel, distance to the lute player some 3 or 4 metres (ca. 12 ft.). She told me she could only hear him when he would strum. On my own gig with mikes and speakers, she could hear every tiny bit of it (including mistakes, alas), or so she said. Don't know why so many of us like to play in churches, but I for one won't hesitate to accept speakers if I'm offered. > something in between astronomy and geometry. No effort to focus on the > audience whatsoever. We concentrated utterly on the music and our > instruments, almost hermetically. Musica reservata. They were simple, serious > and quiet people and they loved it. > I'd rather move the audience - towards a more profound understanding of > history and music in it. I agree in that it comes down to understanding. We will understand things that we have known before. -- Once we had a journalist at our players' meeting. We showed her our lutes and told her bits of their history. You know, stuff like renaissance were played during the renaissance, i. e. late 15th through the 17th centuries and so on. Next day, her report was in the newspaper. Nice pictures, a bit of descriptive text, and the headline read: An Air of the Middle Ages. Mathias To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
