Le 28 janv. 09 à 05:04, David Tayler a écrit :
The vast majority of the early lutes had no body frets, and the high
notes can be easily and with a nice but distinctively different sound
played all the way up the B flat (imaginary fret 15) on the
soundboard..
Some lutes either show body frets or curious decorative squiggles,
but these are a minority report.
We can rule out the orpharion for Neusidler, I think, since it hadn't
been invented yet.
The anhemitonic principle in fretting is well documented, for some
composers, 12 came after 10.
If we built the lutes to favor the fretless sound for the high
positions, they would produce an even better sound.
How would the soundboards differ? Would it be a question of
thickness, or some sort of shaping?
Stephen Gottlieb told me that the French Baroque lutenists shunned
higher frets because of what they considered was the poor sound.
Unfortunately, without checking, I assumed he meant that they did not
use at all, whereas now, I suspect he meant they did not like their
sound.
I had body frets installed anyway, as my lute can also function as a
10c lute, but there again, I now suppose I could have done without.
On my student lute I had cellotaped a piece of fret gut for top
frets, and I imagine that would be a better solution.
Anthony
I suspect they had tastini or "gluons" as well, just for one or two
notes.
dt
At 05:56 AM 1/27/2009, you wrote:
Presumably he didn't have an 11th fret, so his 11th fret is our
12th,
if you see what I mean. :-)
Yes, that makes sense, as do the other responses about the reasons
that
there might not have been an eleventh fret. Wouldn't that mean all
or most
of the lutes at the time all were set up this way? Neusidler would
have used
the symbol that would have been useful to the most player, even if
his own
lute was idiosyncratic.
A little later, Molinaro (Fantasia XII, 1599) uses 'X' (ten),
'n' (eleven)
and '13' (thirteen), but I cannot find a twelfth fret marking!
Does anyone
know what the 'n' stands for?
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