> I think you have answered most of my queries very thoroughly! Thank you!
> It is a nice picture. Who painted it and when? It is difficult to judge > the string length - and the strings of the courses look rather far apart! > My dainty fingure would fit in between them. Yes, the painter didn't seem to care about arranging strings more orderly. Otherwise it is a fairly accurate picture of the guitar. I've put another picture on the same page: www.vihuelademano.com/current/pages/large-guitar.htm Supposedly, they both represent the same person - Mademoiselle de Charolais (no idea who she is). The one in colour is of unknown painter c. 1715 and the other in black and white is attributed to J. -M. Nattier, c. 1730. The main point about these paintings (apart from the looks of course!) is that the depicted guitars are very likely to be identified as being made by the renowned Voboam family of makers in Paris. Some of their surviving guitars (the point that is more relevant to our discussion) have just over 71cm string length. > Well - even I would be happy with that string length. I suppose me too, however I would still prefer to play certain pieces on a vihuela with longer string length and it is often not an extra stretch that bothers me but the rather wide spread of courses over the fingerboard (i.e. if they are spaced more to the 'standards' of a modern reproduction of Renaissance lute). > This is what puzzles me a bit as I can't see the advantage of having a > long > string length for accompanying. Maybe I am mistaken, but I would have > thought the purpose of a long string length would be to tune to a lower > pitch. Such an instrument would play the lowest part in consort as in the > Valderrabano as you say. Tuning to a lower pitch is obviously one of the reasons. Longer string length however leads to greater sonority, power, and greater physical sensation of the sound. We have to remember that musicians in the 16th and most of the 17th centuries have only one string material to rely on - gut (talking about gut-strung instruments of course) and no other means of amplification of the sound as only by changing the size and shape of their instrument's resonating body and the string length accordingly. And how all this drastically started to change from the mid-18th century! For instance, somebody asked another day about the purpose of doubling strings in courses and this was another way to boost up the sonority by creating, so to say, a richer 'harmonic environment', the sort of 'fullness' of the sound (the phenomenon that happens when two strings are tuned to unison / octave but the higher partials of their vibrating modes can never totally coincide neither in frequency nor in phase, they are a bit out of tune). Interesting that Spanish seem to continue to cling to double courses on their guitars longer than others! > Still, maybe St. Mariana didn't have a choice - she just had to make do > with > whatever the convent could provide her with! Or had a secret accompanist . Alexander (Sorry of repeating what Howard has already said. I've only just read his email. Reinforces my point in a way .) To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
