You know, I wonder about the use of synthetic strings vs gut. Certainly a player can feel the difference in his/her fingers, but I'm not convinced that the listener can identify the string material by hearing a performance. The same (IMHO) goes for lots of things that are thought to affect the sound of the lute - the shape of the body, the material of the back. These things may indeed have an effect, perhaps psychological, on the way the musician plays the instrument, but what the audience hears is mostly what the musician puts into the playing, not the details of the instrument itself. Some years ago, at a Lute Society Summer School, Chris Wilson performed an experiment. He played the same pieces on four very different lutes (different makers, some Venetian shape, some Bologna shape, all at the same pitch) to a blindfolded audience of lutenists, and asked them to write on a piece of paper which instrument they thought they were hearing. The results were quite random, with the exception of one instrument that had octave tuning right up to the fourth course - and even then some listeners couldn't identify it. Chris, naturally, said that the instruments felt very different to him as a player, but what the audeince heard was Chris, and the lutes used weren't of great significance. Bill
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