> for all i know, informed discussion of this type > occurs all the time in any discipline. but (roll over > e.b. white) i honestly don't see how anyone - "expert" > or otherwise - can exclude the possibility, the > probability even, that at one time in history many > different instruments carried the same name. simply > as a historical construct (applied to countless > numbers of luthiers in the past, both artiginale and > professional) i can't see how anyone can definitively > catagorize the vihuela based on one or two or three, > lone examples. > > extremely intelligent, terribly esoteric, but what is > "it" - precisely - that are you trying to define?
Just about everyone here other than you would be trying to define the instrument that was considered an alternative for the lute in Spain and Italy, for which Milan, Mudarra, Fuenllana and Narvaez wrote books of music; the instrument pictured on the front of Milan's "El Maestro" (which, I have to say, does not look as if it formerly housed an armadillo). That this is the subject is pretty clear, so at least when we disagree we know what we're disagreeing about. What's unclear is what Bill Kilpatrick means by "vihuela." You can call a Fender Stratocaster a "vihuela" if you like (for all I know, you do), but keep in mind that if you do that on this list, you've effectively started speaking another language in which "vihuela" is a false cognate. I recognize that the word has had other uses, and still does (I played a five-string Mexican "vihuela," which looks like shrunken guitarron, a few weeks ago), but that doesn't make any of them the instrument we're talking about. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
