At 12:19 PM 9/19/2005, bill kilpatrick wrote: >even if no example of an instrument of this shape and style of >construction presently exists in any museum in europe, >might you hazard a guess ( ... stead-y ... ) that they >existed?
I could, but it would be no more than a guess. >as for the variation in the third interval: as the >people who carried these instruments were very far >removed from the influence of formal music training - >to say nothing of a handy music store - wouldn't you >imagine that tuning variations of all sorts were >contrived to meet circumstances - trying ones at that? > one of the charango sources states that hundreds of >regional variations in standard tuning exists in south >america today. Sure, but there is no reason that the experimental isolated tunings of the untrained would continue to be represented in the modern instruments that eventually grew out of theirs either; i.e., jarana cannot be considered an exact, unchanged representative of some unknown renaissance/baroque instrument championed by some sea-going amateur who never really learned to tune it and so tuned it his own way in isolation. The formalized, documented tuning intervals of academic music are more stable by nature and the only historic tunings we have any hope of knowing. >on what do you base the assumption that the first >instruments to arrive in the new world were in any way >different than the ones being made there now - their >new names? I can't make such an assumption...but it might be a riskier assumption to assume they are wholly unchanged from the first instruments to have arrived in the Americas. Where we can trace an instrumental concept with name identity--"guitar," e.g.--it certainly isn't the case that the concept persisted unchanged from the 1500s. All I can KNOW of historic musical instruments is the instruments and associated documentation to have survived from the period in question, and that is to what I had compared the jarana, etc. I'm absolutely certain that more happened in the field of old guitars than what has survived (e.g., no renaissance-era 4-course guitar has survived, although there is surviving published music for it), but without physical, period evidence, whatever that was cannot be considered as any more than the kind of speculation that makes for entertaining movies. I take no issue with historic speculation if it is named such and weighed accordingly. Best, Eugene To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
