Perhaps when you say, "Again, there's no proof, but
increasing the life of a treble string would
undoubtedly have been one of the areas of prime
concern. (Indeed, Mace in 1676 implies that trebles
were stronger than the basses!)"
it depends what that means. As I understand it, under equel tension,
a treble ist still stronger than
a Pistoy or a Venice."
I may be wrong, I often am, but that is what I understood.
I am of course not saying that we could not make stronger trebles.
I am sure we could, and that they indeed existed.
I hope we will see them again.
Anthony
Le 14 févr. 08 à 18:01, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> a écrit :
Hi Ed,
--- Edward Martin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I am uncertain if the strings back in the period
were better than ours
today. That is unproven, and as we have no strings
of which to compare, we
really cannot assume they were better than what is
available today.
But I think we can assume...
At the risk of disagreeing with you and sounding a bit
like Donald Rumsfeld, we KNOW that there is a lot we
do NOT KNOW when it comes to the ancient strings and
how exactly they were made. Back in the day, so much
of the process of making a type of string was specific
to a region and held as a closely kept secret by the
guilds. That's why there are Minikins, ("Munich's"?)
Romans, Lyons, Venice-catlins, etc. - each highly
regarded as centers specializing in a single type of
string, i.e. trebles, meanes, basses, etc.
I can provide no hard evidence, but it's probably a
safe bet that the cities with a reputation for making
the best trebles knew more about the qualities of this
type of string; more than we do now. Does this mean
that they were able to make more robust, longer
lasting strings? Again, there's no proof, but
increasing the life of a treble string would
undoubtedly have been one of the areas of prime
concern. (Indeed, Mace in 1676 implies that trebles
were stronger than the basses!)
Think about it: If all you ever did as an ancient
string maker was concentrate on treble strings, this
would give you plenty of time to try many solutions.
And since the master/apprentice system was in use,
this would provide the chance to implement
improvements over _generations_ within an entire
workshop of subordinates, each with his own expertise
and knowledge. And, if your reputation relied on
making the best possible treble strings, naturally you
wouldn't want anyone else knowing your secret formula.
If this applies to your contemporaries it will apply
even more to folks hundreds of years in the future
(i.e. us).
Today, we put an awful lot of (often misplaced) faith
in our abilities to research and use the scientific
method to solve problems from the past. There's the
unspoken conviction that, with our superior technology
and cognative skills, we will naturally uncover all of
the secrets of the "primitives." (If WE can't make
gut trebles better right now, there's _no_way_ the
ancients could outdo us!) And, being modern
consumers, we expect to be provided a "one stop"
string maker who's trebles, meanes, and basses are all
equally good.
Is it really realistic for us to expect a modern gut
string maker to be able to discover and master all of
the intricasies of making each type of string that all
of the combined workshops of Europe, working with
generations of accumulated technical knowledge
specific to a type of string, each operating in
multiple locales did? Considering the comparitively
short time that serious research has been ongoing into
ancient string-making, the answer is obvious.
My heart is with today's string makers. Keep working
on it; progress is being made. I include modern gut
in my plethora of stringings. And Ed, I applaud your
and others' efforts with using gut strings. You've
gotten some very beautiful results with it.
However, it is a dangerous game for us as players to
be basing important musical considerations solely
around our very limited assumptions of those strings
today.
I was recently in South Dakota, examining 2
Edlingers. One has a string
length of 76 cm, the other one 81 or 82 cm. These
are 13 course baroque
lutes, not theorbos. They certainly could not be
string with a gut treble
up to "f" at 415.
No, what you meant to say is that we can not string it
up to "f" at 415 (or 423 or 445) with one of our guts
today. ;-)
Chris
ed
At 11:43 AM 2/14/2008 +0100, T. Diehl-Peshkur wrote:
Thanks everyone for the responses so far!
The info on wind instruments and the prevalence of
+/- 392Hz etc. is
clear....but I am just not convinced yet...
For most string instruments, the usual method was
to tune the highest note
as high as comfortable, and go from there.
Especially when used for solo work of course.
We hear many stories about how wonderful the old
strings must have been,
etc. so I can only suppose that their gut trebles
didn't break as easily (perhaps) as ours do. I can
now use gut f' at 415Hz
and 68cm for about 2 weeks before it breaks.
If their strings were so much better, than likely
this would be a longer
period.....Or, it could mean that they were using a
higher pitch
to begin with, since their strings were so much
better? I think everyone
using full gut would agree that the basses just
need the extra
pitch raising to 400 or 415 to sound really
optimal. One must always trade
off the sound of the chanterelle and the bass notes
in my personal opnion..
Sure, my lute sounds great at 392 in full gut; but
in trying to find
out/experiment/fantasize about what was typical
back then,
I really wonder if the pitch wasn't higher than we
imagine...despite all the
wonderful recordings in low pitch 392.
Are we merely accepting something because it has
been done that way so
often?
From: howard posner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:03:08 -0800
To: baroque Lutelist
<baroque-lute@cs.dartmouth.edu>
Subject: [BAROQUE-LUTE] Re: Pitch for French music
On Feb 13, 2008, at 3:46 PM, Edward Martin wrote:
Generally, the lute in mid to later 17th century
France was the d
minor
tuning. The top string was usually at "f". For
a length of 68 cm,
generally, a gut treble can go to f at a=415.
If you exceed 68 cm,
the
standard for "a" probably dropped a bit, as with
my many years of
experience, the treble will break prematurely.
For example, if your lute is 72 cm mensur, the
standard should be a
bit
lower, .e. a = 392.
No lie.
392 seems to have been the standard pitch. at least
in Paris, judging
from the woodwind instruments that came from there
in the later 17th
century. You might want to give it a try even on a
68 cm lute and
experiment with the lower tension. In spite of
what you may have
heard recently in this part of cyberspace a propos
of theorbos,
French musicians generally and lutenists in
particular probably were
less concerned with loudness than their Italian
counterparts
(contemporary accounts indicate they didn't play
nearly as loudly),
so in stringing there are aesthetic considerations
at work other than
the breaking point of the high string.
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