Daniel Shoskes wrote: > To my eye in the video, the bass notes are allowed to ring without > damping. I was under the impression that the "Basel school" of playing > was very strict with silencing bass notes at their exact value (unless > using gut with quick decay). > > Is this something that most players here do always, never or only in > specific circumstances (eg hit the 11th course right after the 12 course > and going back to damp the 12th course)?
This technique is an artifact of the near-universal use of Pyramid strings for bass courses 25 years ago. If you didn't want them to ring over each other, you damped them. Today, there are other strings available that are less dense than Pyramids, and I suppose that the players who use Pyramid extension strings do it because they want lots of sustain. So for most players, the default is not to damp. In other words, you damp where over-ring is a musical problem. It used it be that it was always a problem. Now it rarely is. >I have heard one suggestion that in order to get the book published in >Berlin in 1939, inclusion of French composers or even German composers >of questionable background (who like me are eating Matzah this week) >would not have been possible. I didn't know that eating matzah this week made me a German composer of questionable background, but I have to confess I haven't read that particular tractate of the Talmud, and there is a certain amount of confusion in my household on these issues. My three-year-old refused to eat fruit for breakfast this morning because "we only eat bitter herbs." Seriously, I can't think of a German lutenist-composer who would have been a problem in Nazi Germany. HP To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
