Take great care with stretching exercises of the hand!! I deal fairly often
with musicians' injuries, and musicians are nearly as bad as competitive
athletes as far as abusing their bodies to try to get better performance.
Remember that Robert Schumann permanently damaged his right hand trying to
increase his performance by stretching his fingers with some contraption.
Slow and easy is generally the rule of thumb for stretching. Much damage can be
done by stretching too aggressively. Just a reminder....
trj
-----Original Message-----
From: Edward Mast <nedma...@aol.com>
To: Eugene Kurenko <eugene.kure...@gmail.com>
Cc: LuteNet list <lute@cs.dartmouth.edu>
Sent: Wed, Aug 10, 2011 11:59 am
Subject: [LUTE] Re: Renaissance lute & string length
Thank you Bruno and both Eugenes,
Paul O'Dette's comments are very interesting - I'll read the whole
interview, Eugene. ( I wonder what string length P O uses on his Renaissance
lutes). Yes, scale passages are not a problem with longer string lengths, I'm
sure. I would expect the problems to be with fingered chords, especially
barred
chords.
Your stretching exercises are impressive, E.K. I can't achieve that kind
of stretch myself - with practice?? Certainly no problems for you in
performing
the Dowland, at least using single stringing.
-Ned
On Aug 10, 2011, at 2:03 PM, Eugene Kurenko wrote:
> From interview with Paul O'Dette:
>
> Q: Much lute music would seem to be played more easily on smaller instruments
than today's typical G lute, yet contemporary paintings don't show a
preponderance of such small instruments. People living then certainly weren't
bigger than us. Did they stretch more or perhaps weren't so attached to
sustaining notes or am I missing something?
>
> A: This is a very interesting question which has many different aspects. I
think early players developed more stretch than we do today, by doing exercises
to keep the skin in between the fingers as elastic as possible, they also used
various oils to keep the skin flexible, they developed stretching techniques
which involved releasing the thumb from the back of the fingerboard, and also
used the left hand thumb to play some bass notes. The string spacing of most
Renaissance lutes is very tight at the nut, making the lateral stretches easier
than on today's wider spacing. The problem this creates, however, is that it is
more difficult to keep from brushing up against other strings with left hand
fingers since the courses are closer together. This would suggest three things
to me: 1) That they had smaller, thinner fingers which required less clearance,
2) that they came straight down with the l.h. fingers using only the tips of
the
fingers and 3) They were less fussy about li!
ttle noises and buzzes than we are today. I suspect that they also did not
sustain bass notes to nearly the degree we do today.
> -----------------------------------------------------
> Thw whole interview can be found here:
> http://www9.plala.or.jp/edurbrow/PODinterview.html
>
> BTW I play now on lute with 67cm. Not easy but possible even with my smal
hands. But I had to stretch my fingers like this:
> http://pics.livejournal.com/_m_a_s_t_e_r_/pic/0009xtz8
>
> Here is my Dowland on 67cm:
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2srIsT8xuE
>
> As you can see it's not perfect but quite satisfactory. The main difficulties
for me were from double courses. Especially in chords. There is no significant
difference for me in playing scale passages between 60cm and 67cm. But in
chords
theese 7cm are very important. So I had to remove all that doubles and now play
on single courses.
>
> 2011/8/10 Edward Mast <nedma...@aol.com>
> The more I read about the lute during the 16th century, the more it seems to
me that the norm for string length then was closer to 65 cm than the 60 cm
which
seems more favored and common today. Are we (myself included) - who choose the
shorter mensur - wimps? If classical guitarists of all shapes and sizes can
manage a 64 cm mensur, should we lutenists not be able to do likewise? Just
wondering . . .
> -Ned
>
>
>
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