I find this confusing and always have. The Marsh manuscript has a similar convention (i.e. the frets go "l"=10th fret, "m"=12th fret and there would seem to be no 11th fret).
We're told that they generally didn't have body frets so why didn't they just use l=10, m=11, n=12? Why did they not want to play an F# in the highest octave, they seem to be happy to use one in the lower octaves? If they did want an F# and did have body frets, then the lack of an 11th fret would usually mean that fretting on the table where the 11th fret would have been, wouldn't work because the lower height of the table would cause the string to touch the 12th fret. Or am I confused as usual? Regards, Gordon -----Original Message----- From: Stewart McCoy [mailto:lu...@tiscali.co.uk] Sent: Tuesday, January 27, 2009 9:34 AM To: Lute Net Subject: [LUTE] Melchior Neusidler Dear Richard, Presumably he didn't have an 11th fret, so his 11th fret is our 12th, if you see what I mean. :-) A similar thing happens, if I remember right, in the Holmes MSS in Cambridge, where the letter "m" is used for the 12th fret. Best wishes, Stewart McCoy. -----Original Message----- From: Richard Yates [mailto:rich...@yatesguitar.com] Sent: 27 January 2009 03:06 To: 'lute-cs.dartmouth.edu' Subject: [LUTE] Melchior Neusidler Why does M. Neusidler (Intabolatura di Liuto, 1566) uses the symbol 'X' for the tenth fret but 'XI' for notes that would normally be on the twelfth fret? To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
