Dear Bill, Most of us who write to this list are interested in the lute. We want to learn more about it, and about similar instruments played long ago. Our knowledge is sometimes patchy, but by sharing ideas and discussing things together, we can help each other find out more. That's the whole purpose of the list, and there's nowt wrong with that.
You are right to point out the difficulty of nomenclature. An instrument may have more than one name, e.g. the modern violin is sometimes called a fiddle. Two different instruments may share the same name, e.g. a mediaeval fiddle is not the same as a modern one. Identifying surviving instruments is not always easy, but we do what we can with the evidence we have. It doesn't matter if you are not interested in such things, because you can always press the delete key. However, calling a charango a vihuela does not add anything useful. It's just plain daft. Best wishes, Stewart McCoy. ----- Original Message ----- From: "bill kilpatrick" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "lute list" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, September 24, 2004 4:25 PM Subject: Re: fluted ribs > this "is or isn't vihuela" question appears to be the > thread that wouldn't die. ask about fluted ribs and > up it comes ... > > just to let you know ... from now on, at every given > opportunity, in all manner of documentation that's > available to me, i'm going to refer to my charango as > a vihuela; same for the canary island timple i'm > hoping to get and the - who knows how many - ukuleles > i'll probably buy before i die. > > from here on in, they're all vihuelas. > > my hope is that some bright spark in the future will > find this "documentation" - or better yet, a fragment > of this documentation - and set about perpetuating > this ... (let me look this up to be absolutely sure) > .. polemic ... forever. > > 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? > > vexatious litigant (not) - bill To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
