What do you mean about Karajan? he was the most HIP to Strauss's
Rosenkavalier...and with the best orchestra of the time. If you think
it's boring, just wonder if you think the music is boring (for you!).
Early music can be boring too, not allways by the fault of the
performer!. Playing on the rose is also a HIP way of playing the lute,
well documented by iconography, as the use use of nails eg. As there
were many types of lutes, there were many ways of playing indeed
(that's a truism), let alone the mistakes of modern translations of
lute treatises ( I saw somewhere -published- a complete
misunderstanding of what Piccinini says about lute playing in France,
which was translated with the exact opposite real meaning). But indeed
you are certainly quite right about the standardization of the
instrument nowadays: we certainly have to be more ambitiuous about the
use of the correct instruments and strings. But this need a narrow
specialisation of the performers, which is not easy; and more
difficult, we have no real evaluation of the music for the lute, linked
with
Le Lundi 9 decembre 2013 14h43, William Brohinsky
<tiorbin...@gmail.com> a ecrit :
A valid question, Martin, and one which I'm sure we all have faced at
some point. And yet we still are interested in playing lute, and in
my
case, viola da gamba as well.
Here are the thoughts I have had on the subject:
-I own an electric guitar, and a small subset of the amazingly wide
and
varied tone-modifiers and other paraphernalia of electric-guitar use.
And yet, I also own two acoustic 6-strings, two acoustic 12-strings,
two classical guitars (admittedly, my wife brought one to the union)
and a mandolin. Why ever for? I actually do use them, often. For
instance: one of the 12-strings is C-pitched and open-E-'shaped'
tuned.
We have songs we do in our family group when we sing out that use
that
tuning, and by having the guitar down at C I can support just about
anything with a capo. (The other 12 is normal EADGBE tuning, at Db,
because it's 'zero fret' intonation sucks. Same argument with the
capo.) Each of the classicals has a very different tone and touch: on
days when my elbow/wrist injury aftermath is severe, I'm really
limited
to only one of them, skip the rest. I own all of those instruments
because each has a place in music I play, even within the same group.
So answer #1 is timbre. Sometimes the character of the music demands
that the character of the instrument be different.
-I play guitar, bass and a bit of mandolin and banjo. I also play the
electric equivalents of the first two. There are venues in which
electricity is not available, and I suppose I could sell the last
kid's
college off to get some kind of battery operated rig, but even then,
reason #1 does a good job of pointing out why that wouldn't be
prudent.
(That, and the last kid is likely to beat me up. For an
almost-3-year-old, she can do some significant convincing.) There are
times when the lute is even more appropriate to the size of the
venue,
even when the songs are contemporary-products. So reason #2 is venue.
Sometimes the character of the room and the size of the audience
demands something different.
-As I mentioned in the buildup to reason #1, I've damaged my wrists
(back when I fell and end-jammed both arms) and sometimes I can't
play
the instrument that would be perfect. For some of us, it is possible
that the low-tension stringing of a lute makes it possible to
continue
playing after the rest of the instrument world has become horribly
unfavorable. This is a weak answer, of course, because an electric
guitar with ultra-light strings is far easier to play than any of the
lutes I've ever touched... but at the same time, if you've used
ultra-lights, you know that the intonation and tuning is a fleeting
thing. Sometimes you just don't want to mess with that, plus an amp,
plus cords, etc. The claim that a lute was present in every
barbershop
indicates the possibility that (in places where the climate is more
stable than say, Connecticut) a lute can be easier to deal with than
an
electric guitar. Certainly a friend with a lathe can make a peg
turner
with a large-enough diameter that gears aren't needed, so that isn't
even a reason. So reason #3, which I admit is poorly developed, is
physiology.
-Each instrument out of the few I play requires a different touch.
There isn't so much differences between some of them, and there's a
lot
of differences between others which would seem to be identical. My
touch on all of them is better when I play lots of them, simply
because
it keeps the muscles trained, the ear sensitive, and my mind focused
on
what the current axe needs to get the sound I need to give to others.
This goes for the right hand as well as the left: you can't have the
same level of slovenly left-hand technique on a lute that works on an
acoustic. So the diversity of touch leads to reason #4, flexibility.
For someone wedded to one guitar and one style who will never have to
play with a different group or be asked to play a different style,
flexibility isn't such an issue. For me, playing from medieval to (if
my younger son gets his way) dubstep, sheesh. Flexibility is its own
reward.
-A lot of people who play a modern six-string guitar have no idea
that
they can do things other than what they've learned. Some of them run
into someone who plays the same instrument and style who widen their
horizons a bit. Most of them just don't. They have no sense of
history
at all, no idea that the guitar didn't always have 6 single strings,
or
that 12-string guitars, tenor guitars and bass guitars are not just
mildly related, but brothers. Even the Ukulele (tuned like a
re-entrant
tenor guitar), as foreign as it seems to most is a brother (or maybe
sister?) They look upon the Harp Guitar as a weird modern addition,
perhaps to be avoided. Just knowing a little about the lute changes
their sense of organization of the universe, and I've seen
guitar-only
friends have epiphanies that bring them from the fringe outskirts of
music history right into its middle. It usually starts with "Why do
you
play so many instruments?" or "How can you play so many instruments?"
or even "Why do you bother with the lute when there's electric
guitars?" Then I really peak their interests (even if they've
experimented with tunings like DADGAB) by pointing out the lute
tuning,
show them how it shifts the chords over by one string, and that the
addition of another string at the bottom widens the range without
requiring acrobatics up the neck, etc. In short, reason #5,
historical
perspective, is valid because you can't really understand the
instrument you play without an understanding of how it relates to
other
instruments, its own predecessors included, and can't understand
where
it's going (even unto 9-string bass guitars) without it.
-Finally, I looked at it from the other end. (I do this a lot, and I
hope it's one of the things that makes me a better test engineer!) I
started playing lute tab on a retuned, capoed guitar, because I had
friends who wanted to sing Dowland songs, and it made more sense to
use
his own arrangements than to cut a finger off and mount it on an
extension from my elbow. (OK, a bit of an exaggeration here, but if
you've tried some of Bach's lute music on guitar, you know what I
mean.) That took me on a path that ended in lutes. Now, along the
way,
I learned that this was the equivalent of our 60's protest music, but
300-500 years earlier. So, if I could make up a song about something
that mattered to me today, using today's instruments, and they could
make up a song about something that mattered to them on the
instruments
of their time, why not make up songs about things that mattered to me
now, using their instruments (styles, etc) and steal a march on my
own
contemporaries... kind of like what Vaughn Williams and Holst did,
but
using their instruments? And now, Sting is doing just that, and
making
money doing it (yea Sting!). So maybe reason #6, innovation through
historical theft is as good now as it was when it was plagiarizing
your
contemporaries.
So there's six of the myriad reasons that I believe strongly in the
value of the lute in modern times, and see no problem with trying to
develop a lexicon of modern theory on ancient instruments. YMMV, of
course, and I'll be honest, I don't often _want_ to listen to modern
theory worked out on ancient instruments any more than I enjoy
listening to all compositions on modern instruments using the same
theory. But there are the occasional bright light, and the world
would
be considerably darker, even through my rose-colored lenses, without
them.
On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 7:31 AM, Martin Shepherd
<[1][1]mar...@luteshop.co.uk> wrote:
Dear Ernesto,
Apologies - I copied this to the list as well, I hope you don't
mind.
I agree that the most important thing is for music to be
"interesting and captivating". Never mind Karajan, much of the
playing of modern lute players could be regarded as boring, too.
But we *do* care about "academic explanations" - in other words,
historical perspectives - otherwise we wouldn't be playing lutes at
all. I think most of us play the lute because we are really
interested in the music which survives from the past and we also
believe that to understand this music and present it in the best
possible way we need to study how lutes were made, which ornaments
were played, etc, etc. Whether or not what we do, as a result of
all this research, is convincing to a modern audience is always
doubtful.
If we don't care about this historical research, why play the lute
at all? The electric guitar, in all its myriad forms, is the
plucked instrument of today, and it works very well indeed. Better
than a single-strung archlute with overspun nylon strings, anyway.
Best wishes,
Martin
On 09/12/2013 02:44, [2][2]erne...@aquila.mus.br wrote:
I totally agree, but some music is simply boring, even if well
recorded, marketed, etc. - take Karajan, or whatever.
Maybe in a few years we will hear Karajan and say it is really
jazzy, hip, subtle and interesting - but for the time being it is
rather boring.
Who cares about academic explanations for the way you play, it has
got to be interesting and captivating in the first place.
And may I beg your pardon, but many of our romantic heroes' music
does not sound interesting to me.
Ernesto Ett
11-99 242120 4
11-28376692
Em 07.12.2013, `as 08:42, Martin Shepherd
<[3][3]mar...@luteshop.co.uk>
escreveu:
Hi All,
I am a bit dismayed by a modern orthodoxy about lutes and lute music
which is so dismissive of things which stand outside that orthodoxy.
Whether or not you like Bream's lutes or his playing, he was the
first
to show that it *could* be done.
But the main thing which troubles me is that the basis of this
current
orthodoxy is so shaky. Modern lutemakers base their instruments on
just a few museum specimens which are not necessarily representative
of
the multiplicity of lutes of the past, and while we now make lutes
which are much closer to historical instruments than those of 20 or
30
years ago, we still don't understand how strings were made in the
past
and still can't reproduce them.
Despite much research, modern players have to guess at the nature of
musical phrasing and mostly ignore the very important dimension of
ornamentation, either playing no ornaments at all or taking an
"anything goes" approach. We also mostly ignore the fact that 17th
and
18th century lute players played very close to the bridge with their
fingers plucking almost at right angles to the strings. This has
far-reaching implications - playing more or less thumb-inside and
over
the rose, modern players need quite high string tensions, probably
much
higher than were used in the past.
We may like what the best players do now, but it is foolish to think
that it is historically plausible, let alone "correct".
Martin
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