Provided they are well fitted and maintained (and strings properly
fastened to them) wooden pegs are, in fact, eminently practical and, of
course, weigh significantly less than metal tuners - a
practical consideration especially with later lutes.
However whilst the precise tuning mechanism employed may not have much
affect on how the music sounds, the matters you raised earlier (like
how and where to pluck) certainly do. It's not only to try and
recapture the sound the 'Old Ones' made but to respect the composer's
intentions and a belief that this provides the best path to
understanding how they expected their music to be heard. J S Bach may,
or may not, have welcomed a modern pianoforte with sustaining pedal but
the fact is that he didn't have one.
Of course, anyone wishing to compose new music employing a different
technique or a different instrument - then good luck! But please bear
in mind that one person's flight of imaginative fancy may well be
another's self-indulgent racket in such a laissez-faire world.
Nowadays we've generally moved on from thinking that instruments and
technique automatically improve ('evolve') over time in a sort of
Darwinian survival of the fittest sense. Much of the success of the
modern early music/period performance movement is a belief that the
musicians of the time knew how to play their music on instruments of
the period and that these instruments were perfectly capable of
producing the sound the musicians required. Of course now, as then,
there are various schools (frequently national) which offer different
interpretations of the same piece and long may they do so!
MH
__________________________________________________________________
From: Tobiah <[email protected]>
To: Martyn Hodgson <[email protected]>; Martin Shepherd
<[email protected]>; "[email protected]"
<[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, 4 August 2014, 16:37
Subject: Re: [LUTE] Re: Bare spot on soundboard.
> If we aim to recapture the sound the
> Old Ones made then it is surely right to adopt the same technique
they
> used.
As a fringe exercise, rather like a reenactment of the civil war, I can
see having some interest in duplicating as close as possible, what was
done with the music and instruments during the time that they were
created.
I sometimes get a sense however that there is some taboo in searching
out new adaptations of lute music or lutes themselves. I've long
lamented the apparent resistance of using modern tuning machines
on a lute for example. Had they been available at the time, I'm rather
certain
that the old masters would have joyously adopted them. I guess it's
like asking what Bach would have done if he had a pedal. I'm
more interested in what I will do now that I have one.
As for the technique, and what oil paintings depict, and what
people wrote about at the time, I'd have to wonder what might
have developed had the internet been available and instantaneous
sharing of modified techniques and their results was possible.
There must have been a rather dogmatic "do as I say"
passing of knowledge from teacher to student in the likely small
world of the masters. Of this I know little however as I'm sure
the scholars here will soon point out.
I understand the interest in duplicating old practices, but see
a disproportionately small push to further evolve and modify aspects of
performance and instruments taking advantage of the modern availability
of
technologies and knowledge that we now have.
Perhaps I will now be flooded by videos of people who do just
that. I'll welcome it. I'm just a fringe lurker on the world
of the lute player, so be gentle in correcting my assertions please.
Tobiah
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