I suppose you are talking about the fact that the wooden frets are
fixed and may not correspond to the tuning that you are using,
or do you mean that there is a difference of tone with a wooden fret?
When I mentionned Stephen's having set my Baroque lute in 6th comma,
many people here protested that French Baroque lute must have been
very close to Equal,
and yet Stephen told me that French Baroque players shunned wooden
frets because of their poor sound. I am now wondering whether this
might imply that they did
vary their tuning, or simply that the sound of a gut fret and a
wooden fret are distinct, and this was what they disliked, or again
simply theu did not like the extreme high
as they did tend to revel in the mid rather than top or bass.
I would be glad to receive some enlightenment about that.
Anthony
Le 28 janv. 09 à 08:02, Daniel Winheld a écrit :
I once tore the wooden frets off my six-course lute (got sick of bad
intonation with gut midrange & bass strings) and played it that way
for a few years. One soon learns to fret those notes with correct
intonation after a reasonable amount of proper practice, and a whole
new sound register opens up. In fact, with or without body frets I
recommend that all serious lute students- when the general level of
competence permits- should spend time practicing scales & improvised
passagi beyond the frets. One toccata by Piccinini (Posthumous 2nd
volume published in 1639 by his son Leonardo Maria Piccinini) goes to
the 19th semitone- about 1/4" short of the rose on my archlute- and
most of us could certainly go to the 15th semitone. An added bonus
from this practice is fluency within the "standard" one octave
compass. Far too many of us suddenly shut down and stop when sight
reading (duets, for instance) when the action goes beyond the 7th
fret. Beyond the frets, there is neither hemitonic nor anhemitonic; a
liberating tonic to the ear. But you got to learn precision, which
pays dividends.
Dan
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.
I suspect they had tastini or "gluons" as well, just for one or
two notes.
dt
--
To get on or off this list see list information at
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
