On Fri, Aug 15, 2014 at 7:29, R. Mattes <r...@mh-freiburg.de> 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 To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html