At 11:19 AM 10/10/2006, Caroline Usher wrote: >At 06:24 AM 10/10/2006, gary digman wrote: > >I think the lute died for the same reason all the soft voiced insturments > >died, i.e. the plucked keyboards (spinets, clavichords, harpsichords, etc), > >the violas da gamba, and at the same time. When the concert hall was > >invented in the early 18th century, the idea was to put as many rear ends in > >as many seats as possible. Thus the loud voiced instruments fell into favor. > >But the guitar survived, and it did not become a concert-hall instrument >until the 20th century. There's a massive amount of chamber music from >the 19th century. Why couldn't the lute have continued equally with the >guitar in that setting? > >I don't know the answer but I am pretty sure that it's not lack of volume.
Just a couple random musings, and I'm happy to hear some scholarly refinement/correction. The baroque aesthetic lost sway and a taste to more fully exploit modulation emerged (extended development sections in sonata-allegro form, e.g.). Diapasons and strings with open diatonic tunings aren't so modulation-friendly, and modulation to remote keys thus limits the functional range of an instrument that relies heavily on open diatonic strings, as most lute-like things of the time did. Most guitars are fully fret-able throughout their range. Lute tried with things like mandora. Also, guitars quickly moved to single-strung as the status quo in the late 18th-early 19th c. I think single-string tone might lend itself a bit better to the clear and simple symmetry through contrasts that evolved with the classical aesthetic. Eugene To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
