On May 4, 2006, at 5:03 PM, Howard Posner wrote: > The pictures show that painters' models held lutes that way. I'm not > sure what they tell us about actual players.
Absolutely. They were posing with the lute as a prop. In order to be "doing something," some of them would be portrayed tuning the instrument, or appearing to sing. I'm sure that very few, if any, of those paintings were intended as didactic visual aids to posture and "correct" luteplaying. On the other hand, there are some features that many of the paintings have in common e.g. the height and angle of the lute in the 16th century paintings, and the right-hand position in the 17th-century ones. Perhaps we can take those similarities as evidence of actual performance practice. Who knows? (Personally, I reckon they did just as we do today: they did what worked for them and what produced the best music. I've always believed that if you want to get the historical lute "experience," pick up your historical lute and play it.) David R [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.rastallmusic.com To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
