Dear Stephan, I think some of us here might want to disagree with your last sentence: the basic tuning of the Dm lute is f'-d'-a-f-d-A, so if (as you say) ET was needed for this tuning, it would also be needed for Ren lute, since the 2nd to 4th courses are tuned the same. Using meantone temperaments on Baroque lute is just as good (and just as problematic!) as using them on Renaissance lute.
Best wishes, Martin Stephan Olbertz wrote: >Dear all, > > from a temperaments view it would be much likelier that Weiss used a mandora > tuning in E or D, maybe without the first string as Baron (?) suggested (?). > I don't have the passages at hand to see if this reading is possible. Anyway, > theorbos, archlutes and mandoras could be set up in the usual 18th century > temperament (according to Tosi, L.Mozart and others), based on a 55 division > of the octave. This is somewhere between 1/6 pythagorean and 1/6 syntonic > comma meantone and an old hat. Baroque lute tuning on the other hand has to > be ET to function. > > >Best regards, > >Stephan > > > To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html