Dear Chris, please don't stop. If you come into another flow of writing I will be most happy to read your explanations of the following (even if it is not exactly about the lute, but guitar is a close-by instrument, isn't it?):
" I'd better stop before I go into my rant about how the the right hand intentions of the widely-used Carcassi etudes have been misunderstood, misappropriated and bowdlerized in every single modern edition... :)" All this fingering stuff is exciting. I wonder a lot, for instance, why some great masterns did not use ring finger (if my memory is right I read that SL Weiss did not use it, even in playing chords of more than three notes - but I'm not sure), or even not middle finger, thus chord striking and playing arpeggios seems much more difficult for my humble brain. My guitar teacher taught me once to even use the pinky for larger chords in case and train it like the other fingers... Best Franz -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
