Dear Howard,
You are absolutely right, we need constantly to remember that.
At the conclusion of a piece I wrote about the timber trade for
lutemakers I put the following totally unscientific guesstimate. This
is in the context of just 826 surviving lutes of all periods including
a lot of late mandoras and baroque lutes which fall outside my
guesstimate.
The numbers of lutes produced must have been quite staggering when we
consider that just a one day snapshot of Laux Maler's workshop shows
over a thousand lutes and a similar snapshot shows 376 Moises
Tiefembruker lutes. And these are only two of dozens of workshops
producing lutes for at least 150 years. One would have to make far too
many assumptions to calculate anything like a reliable figure. But if I
just offer a totally unreliable 'back of envelope' calculation using
fairly conservative figures of 25 workshops producing 300 lutes per
year over 150 years that makes 1,125,000 lutes. The same proportion of
yew lutes as have survived gives 292,207 yew lutes with, say 25 ribs,
that makes well over 7 million yew lute ribs.
The depredations of the arms trade and the lutemakers mean that there
are now no significant stands of yew in the whole of Europe and it is a
protected species over much of the continent.
Best wishes,
David
At 22:30 -0800 14/2/18, howard posner wrote:
> On Feb 13, 2018, at 3:38 AM, Luca Manassero <l...@manassero.net>
wrote:
>
> this could be a sort of proof that lutes extending to the
contra-G
> existed, but in that case why is this an unicum?
Because all the other 14-course lutes were lost in fires, or eaten
by termites, or rotted in damp basements, or, if they were built
like the Hoffman instrument we've been talking about, were converted
into soup kettles or small boats?
We all know that surviving lutes are a fossil record-a tiny remnant
of the instruments that were built and played in their day-but we
constantly forget it and fall into the trap of assuming that what
survives in that record is an indication of the numbers that existed
three centuries ago. It's possible that there was only one
14-course German baroque ever, but far more likely that there were
others that have perished over time.
To get on or off this list see list information at
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
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