On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 7:29, R. Mattes <[email protected]> wrote:
On Thu, 14 Aug 2014 22:26:19 +0200, Benjamin Narvey wrote
> Both. Whike French theorboes tended to be single strung,
Taken from Robert Spencer's article:
"He [Mersenne] added the correction that his engraving of
a tuorbe (Fig. 16) should be called arciliuto, and that the tiorbe was
larger and single-strung."
I have not checked the original Mersenne, but assuming that the article
correct, this seems to be rather good evidence that at least some
theorbos were single strung, both French and Italian.
This sounds as if we can make sound statements about the the types
of
instruments used in France. How large is our sample compared to the
population? (Read: how many surviving instruments/paintings do we
have)
30 out of 300? 40 out of 4000? 50 out of 10.000? BTW. this is a
serious
question.
It may be an interesting exercise to find out, but what would interest
me more (and perhaps modern performers of the French repertoire) is to
find out what kinds of instruments the important French players would
have performed on. I know there is little evidence that links
historical players with their instruments, but every time I play the
pieces of the great French violist Marin Marais, I see very obvious
single-strung 6+8 theorbos on the frontispiece. If Marais (and his
engraver) chose to have those kinds of instruments decorating his
publicationsawhy would you include pictures of instruments you didn't
want heard in your musicaI suppose it's evidence good enough for me to
consider that they probably played on instruments that were similar. If
Marais did intend the use of single-strung 6+8 theorbos in his music,
it would not be too difficult to imagine that many of his 'music de
chambre' colleaguesaincluding De VisA(c)eawould have done something
similar.
So did Visee play a rather unusual instrument in this picture
(http://www.hoasm.org/VIIB/Visee.html)?
To me, the instrument seems to be held quite high, making the
instrument seem larger than it is. There also seems to be some
perspective distortion: you can tell from the way the guitar looks in
the foreground. This seems to also add to the illusion of a big
instrument. Also we must take into account that these men are probably
physically smaller than how we perceive them. There is evidence that
there was a decrease in height during the 17th and 18th centuries, the
average, according to a quick Google search, of around 5' 6" or around
168cm.
I would say it is more likely an arciliuto, as described by Mersenne.
> only the
> largest Italian ones (stopped string length near 100 cm) were
> single; the vast majority of Italian theorboes (and the ones
> corresponding to the sizes we tend to play, 80 cm and up) almost
> always double.
Poor Castaldi - according to his own engravings he played an
instrument
that, according to modern folklore, was a typical french theorbo
(rather
small, single strung with a roundish/deep body).
> This can be seen in both surviving instruments,
> historical sources
What kind of sources besides iconography and surviving instruments?
>and iconography. I refer you to the excellent
> thesis of Lynda Sayce for an in depth review of the material and
> surviving instruments.
No, I think there is a statistical fallacie here: surviving
instruments
can not be used to estimate the original theorbo population. To do
so
you'd first need to formulate your question(s), then pick a relevant
set
of samples and have them survive (a rather absurd idea). The
survival of
a theorbo might be caused by rather distorting reasons: maybe the
isntrument was especially beatiful, or impressive (if so, you'd
expect
larger instruments to survive) or so useless/bad that it wasn't
played
until totally broken. Or too big to be reworked into a baroque
lute/gallichon/mandora.
Cheers, RalfD
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