Le 21 janv. 08 à 10:36, LGS-Europe a écrit :
Oops, sorry to Pietro and David - I hope you are not offended by
my comment.
It did bring a broad smile to my face, though, which is not such a
bad thing
these days.
Rob
I was laughing out loud the full week of receiving the music,
chuckling during rehearsals and smiling during the concert.
David - enjoying a hilarious job at times
David
Can you smile and laugh and play that instrument at the same time.
I thought you had to clench your teeth? You might have swallowed the
thing ...
One of my students used one of these to demonstrate the resonance
patterns of the vowles in various languages (by completely removing
the vocal cord resonance, which tends to mask this quality).
It was very revealing, but it did cause great and rather
uncontrollable hilarity.
On a slightly more serious note, if this was, as you seem to imply,
serious Baroque music, held in esteem at the time, it might tell us a
little more about the Baroque aesthetic. Perhaps, texture and sound
quality were just as important to them as extreme stability of
frequency, or stable in tune-ness. They would have loved a slightly
earthy bass string.
Regards
Anthony
PS: Disclaimer.
Someone sending me a private reply commented on my one-page summary
of Albrechtsberger, Jew's harp, mandora and personal adventure,
implying that my paragraph on the mandora ...
A mandora, also known as calchedon or colachon, is an 18th century
German
lute with 6 to 8 courses (of sometimes single strings) and 10 frets
on the
neck. The tuning of the first 6 courses is usually d'-a-f-c-G-D, but
Albrechtsberger's music requires a mandora tuned a tone higher to
e'-b-g-d-A-E
(just like a guitar), with courses 7 and 8 tuned to D and C.
Although they
look alike at first glance, the construction was different from
that of a
baroque lute, allowing higher tension strings for greater volume,
because a
mandora was specifically designed for continuo playing. The
surviving solo
music is much simpler than that for baroque lute.
<<
.. was lacking in clarity. He said the large A tuned instrument
(string length c. 95cm) was the professional continuo instrument,
and said he wanted to know of evidence showing the D (or E) tuned
galichonmandora was used for continuo. I have none. Semantically I
think you could argue I didn't claim to either, safely leaving the
continuo part of the story to the mandora in general without
connecting it to string lengths or tunings, but I don't deny you
could also read in my passage that mandoras in D and E were
'specifically designed for continuo playing', too. I should think
any instrument in the hands of a professional continuo player will
serve as continuo instrument, by the way, but that is besides the
point for someone seeking evidence of past use. And a good point
that is. Once more, I have none and will gladly bow to superior
knowledge.
****************************
David van Ooijen
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.davidvanooijen.nl
****************************
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