--- "Eugene C. Braig IV" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The formalized, > documented tuning intervals of academic music are > more stable by nature and > the only historic tunings we have any hope of > knowing.
if that's all you're looking for. isn't it just as feasible to consider those tunings to be genuine in european origin and as unchanging as the guitar/vihuela variations which support them? how feasible is it that a south american would be determined enough to alter an existing instrument and its tuning - passed down to him, ultimately, from the first europeans off the boat - to make it sound more "south american?" > ... 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. don't know how suitably entertaining it would be for movies but that's something, at least. especially when considering that "standards" in the manufacture of anything is a 20th cent. concept and there's no counting for the individual taste of luthiers or their clients - past or present. it seems awfully mean to me to endlessly restrict the making or recognition of period instruments to just those few examples which remain. must cook ... then eat ... chow - bill "and thus i made...a small vihuela from the shell of a creepy crawly..." - Don Gonzalo de Guerrero (1512), "Historias de la Conquista del Mayab" by Fra Joseph of San Buenaventura. go to: http://www.charango.cl/paginas/quieninvento.htm ___________________________________________________________ How much free photo storage do you get? Store your holiday snaps for FREE with Yahoo! Photos http://uk.photos.yahoo.com To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
