Just massaging the skin between the fingers helps a great deal and is also
quite healthy.
Regards
Stephan
Am 10.08.2011, 22:42 Uhr, schrieb <[email protected]>:
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 <[email protected]>
To: Eugene Kurenko <[email protected]>
Cc: LuteNet list <[email protected]>
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 <[email protected]>
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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