On Feb 1, 2008, at 12:44 AM, Martyn Hodgson wrote: > Not really what I wrote, but...
No; as I said, I was giving more information than you did. > Perhaps I made assumptions as to the general level of knowledge. > In particular I took it as read that nobody believed that A or G > instruments with a string length in the high 80s/90s would not > require the first two courses tuned down the octave; if this is > accepted than the rest naturally follows. Nothing that we've actually been discussing follows from it. Small instruments strung single reentrant certainly doesn't follow from big instruments requiring double reentrant stringing. You made the emphatic but uninformative statement that "ALL the evidence on theorboes with first two courses an octave down is for instruments larger than the biggest you [i.e. David Tayler] recommend." The obvious question was "WHAT historical evidence?" since most of us know that there is no evidence correlating any particular known instrument to any particular tuning or pitch. So David Tayler and I both asked the question, David asking about evidence of stringing/tuning of specific surviving smaller theorbos. These were, of course, rhetorical questions to which the only rational response was an acknowledgment that your statement about "ALL evidence" was was unsupported. > Bob Spencer's article in Early Music (available online) was one of > the first papers to explain all this and, if you don't know it, it > is still a good overview. I'm not sure what you mean by "all this." Your statements on either side of this sentence are about the effect of specific string lengths on tuning, what's needed for the "most powerful sound," and breaking points of strings. Spencer's article does not discuss these things. > In short, to obtain the most powerful sound from plain gut strings > requires the longest possible string length which is ultimately > governed by the breaking stress of gut of the highest pitched string. There are two major problems with this statement, other than it's not bearing one way or another on the actual question. First, it's grounded in the assumption that "most powerful sound" is the governing consideration in stringing a theorbo. This could hardly have been universally true historically. Why even build a double-strung theorbo if loudness is all you want? Yet the majority of surviving instruments are made for double-stringing. Indeed, why build the instruments under discussion at all? An emphasis on loudness is not in keeping with what we know of French baroque aesthetic generally, and wasn't it Mersenne who said the archlutes in Italy were louder than French theorbos? I'd guess that French theorbo tone was to Italian theorbo tone as French harpsichords were to Italian ones. Players may have been more concerned with tone or playability, or with what would fit in a carriage and not get rained on. They might, like David Tayler, have been concerned with an extra .3 kilos of weight, for what reason I don't know. The range of motives and preferences of theorbists across Europe in 1635 or 1695 had to be at least as wide as our own, and almost certainly wider. Second, as we all know, size isn't everything. Bigger-is-louder is true only if all other things are equal. My Hasenfuss Raillich model is a smallish theorbo (perhaps a "toy" at 81 cm) but louder than a lot of big ones. It's basically the same model as Paul O'Dette's, which I imagine a lot of listers have seen. I actually had mine made 81cm instead of the standard 82cm because I wanted to be able to string it in single-reentrant in A, at 415 (I do know something about the relationship of length and tuning), which I did for a few months. It worked with a nylon high string; I wouldn't have risked a gut one, and I wouldn't have tried it at all at 440. So you can insist, as adamantly as you like, that a theorbo below a certain size (you've never said what size) had to be strung single- reentrant -- or that a double second course in octaves was/is impossible-- but it isn't helpful to claim that there's evidence to support those views, or to assume that anyone who disagrees with them simply doesn't understand and should be referred generally to previous discussions or the literature on the subject. -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
