Dear Collected Wisdom, It struck me this week that I really don't know when the thirteen-course "rider" lute developed. We know from Weiss's correspondence that he developed the swan-neck lute c.1719-20, but what do we know about its rider cousin? I have to now uncritically assumed that the rider lute came before the swan neck, presumably thinking so because it is visually closer to a conventional eleven course, and we tend to assume today an "evolutionary" paradigm that explains the lute as gradually becoming bigger over time (6c-7c-8c-9c-10c-11c-12c-13c...) I realise this paradigm is by no means historical or even accurate - it does not account for the huge renaissance bass lutes such as Hartung's instrument in C in Nuernberg, or some smaller baroque lutes that one finds in various collections - and yet it persists. But perhaps the rider lute may be a later development than the swan neck when seen from the point of view of string technology: perhaps the extended neck was needed in order to accommodate the lower tessitura of the 12th and 13th courses before the introduction (and more importantly, the acceptance among players) of wound strings (initially developed in the 1670's, they seem to have taken a long time to catch on) that permitted the same pitches to be played at the shorter string length of the rider model. So, did the development go 11c -> swan neck -> rider lute, or 11c -> rider lute -> swan neck? I realise that this is in a sense a bogus question, both because the 11c never went out of fashion, and because the rider lute and swan neck model coexisted (i.e., one did not cancel out the other: for example, we know that Weiss had both, since he at once developed the swan neck all while writing pieces that occasionally demand the stopped 9th and 10th courses necessitating a rider model.) That said, the chronology of the rider lute's development is something we could know about. When are the first pieces that use 13 courses anyway? I presume around 1700-1715? Do these early pieces indicate anything regarding lute type? Anything anyone on this list may have to say about this subject would be much appreciated! As ever, Benjamin --
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