I'm a little surprised at people who try pinkie playing for a either a few minutes or as much as a couple of months and then reject it. I remember lutenist Chris Wilson saying it took him six years to stop playing the lute like a guitar, a time period similar to my own. I came to Sor's technique after playing lute for ten years. It is an extraordianrily subtle technique by a master guitarist, one which I still try to understand the subtleties of.
This topic seems to keep being dragged into debate about whether it is a good technique or not. I'm sorry to have to keep saying that these points are irrelevant to a historical discussion, and make me think that most of the posters (with some exceptions) play modern classical guitar in a modern technique but are interested in the early repertoire. Nothing wrong with that, of course. The discussion I would like to see is how different Sor's technique makes Sor's music sound. An appreciation of that might shed new light on Sor's music. In my own experience (keeping in mind I cannot say for sure if my technique is exactly what Sor describes) is .... Actually it is very hard to describe! Mixed in with the technique is the question of interpretation. A knowledge of figured-bass (which Sor certainly had) is crucial to understanding his compositional process. I'll try to find time over the coming month to record some MP3 files - much easier to hear than discuss. Rob www.musicintime.co.uk To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
