At 10:45 PM +0100 3/15/04, bill wrote: >thanks ed. > >i once saw a hungarian kobsa which looked to me >like any other, bowl backed, lute-type >instrument. these ukrainian instruments appear >to be flat backed and quite thin. i find it >interesting that (according to one of the sites >you supplied me) it was originally carved from >one piece of wood, much like a citole. > >i don't know how far down this particular road >members of the list will want to go but i'm >trying to reintroduce the charango back into the >european family of bowl-backed, stringed >instruments as a close relative who has found >its way home after a 500 year or so ramble >through the andes. there's an illustration in >the "cantigas" collection which shows some dandy >playing - what to all intents and purposes is - >a charango. > >olè! - bill
Hi Bill: I don't know that much about early instruments except through my daughter Alice who is a medieval instrument maker and researcher into medieval instruments. (I'm her go-fer, fact-finder and librarian.) Almost all medieval stringed instruments except for the lute were probably hollowed out. Alice is just completing her Masters degree which combined making a reconstruction of the citole in the British museum, called The Warwick Castle Gittern, and the study of citoles in XIII century art. It took her a lot of work to make a citole using broadaxe, adze and chisel. Last summer I drove her along the Camino de Santiago, where she photographed and made drawings of 26 or more sculptured citoles. Most of them appear above church portals depicting the elders of the apocalypse. Her comment afterwards was: "Spain looks a lot like a church portico." She spent hours in front of cathedral tympanums. I'll have to get her a begging bowl if she wants to do the trip again. Alice is currently trying to get funding for a PhD on the Cantagas. "I am considering as a proposed Ph.d. topic the study of stringed instruments depicted in illustrated manuscripts from the court of Alfonso X and how they relate to other contemporary sources both from the Iberian peninsula and the other major centers of intellectual activity (London/Oxford, Paris, and maybe Bologna?). The study would concentrate primarily on the Cantigas de Santa Maria manuscripts and four instruments in The Book of Chess." It's amazing how little scholarly work has been done on the instruments of the Cantigas. Alice and I have put together a 62 page bibliography of research done on the Cantigas and almost none deal with the instruments depicted. Your comment that one of the Cantigas instruments looks like a charango is quite interesting and I'll pass it on to Alice. Hollowing out an armadillo should be easier than hollowing out a log. Alas, that there were no armadillos in medieval Spain! Ed
