Hi Tobias,
Despite holding it upside down, Hendrix did adhere to a lot of
standard techniques of electric guitar playing. His rendition of a
certain repurposed English glee song was more an experiment in melody
and feedback (and propriety) than technique in my opinion. Be that as
it may - let's not get into a Hendrix loop if we can help it. It's a
shame he never recorded Suzanne un jour, tho. It would have been
glorious! I'd click on that and crank it up - because I can.
But, Tobiah, I did like this line of yours: Our ears are in tune with
a different set of practices now (at least the general public).
...with which I must agree.
To start at random, those of us who have been brain-trained to accept
the modern major-minor scales have been hard-wired to certain
emotional effects. It's very difficult to untrain our ears to hear
the modes as Josquin, Francesco, Dowland and all the composers who
used them. They had certain emotional flavors that evolved from Dufay
to Josquin to Lasso to the Gaultiers to Rameau, etc. Very few of us
have the chance to hear a Phrygian or Lydian composition with the
same ears as it was meant to be heard. "Oooh, that's kind of minor,
isn't it?"
And volume - we've been trained to accept music at volumes never
conceived of before (ok, outside the rare Brumel and multi-chorus
extraveganza). Today's choices of volume, tone colors, sustain,
rhythms, 'fixing it in post' - as we commonly accept them today -
would be completely foreign to the Old Ones. Can we unlearn these
terms in order to hear what might have been imagined when they saw or
wrote music on paper then? And the power to instantly change it:
Crank those Ramones up! ... till the phone rings!
How do we unhear what we know is possible from Beethoven, Stravinsky,
Cage and Eno to hear the cutting modern edge of Kapsberger? There
were probably those who thought it was horrible and were aghast at
what music had become in the hands of these lutenist upstarts. Now
we're amused and impressed by his daring. How do we get that back?
(Maybe a whammy bar and holding the lute upside down! Graphite!)
Should we?
And the occasion of music: Now we hear canned symphonies and "easy
listening" in the supermarket, buildings spaces, alarm clocks and
telephones in any grade of ability, volume, tone color and expectancy
of attention - for various purposes. And we accept it! This is
normal! These, indeed, are not the ears that heard the early music we
discuss here. Can we even compare whistling L'homme armee while
taking your pig to the market to having an iPhone with 10 gigs of
mp3s in the car on the way to Costco?
We have access to the entire corpus of surviving music for any given
period (as well as what it had been and would evolve to) to play
from. And that's a lot more than many amateurs or pros had then. Then
you would have been at the mercy of what you had in your
notebook/memory or what the present performers wanted to play. The
restriction changes how you see the opportunity to hear it.
And those niggling performance questions: should I wear tails (19th
century)? A tie and jacket (mid-20th century)?
Birkenstocks/Tevas/barefoot (last 30 years, California centric)? or
... You-tube?
A lot of this, of course, is carryover from HIP discussions but we
should remember that it's not just a _performance_ question but a
listener situation. It's the ears that Tobias brings up.
For me, the ultimate creativity is to try and hear it in the way it
was purposed. I've got plenty of modern, thank you, even before I
consider modern stringing on a better/more modern instrument. It
takes a lot more 'work' to ditch the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries
than to work the "modern" into my lute music. No, I will never be
successful in eliminating this world (and the tinnitis-tinged ears
they've created) but I finally have a somewhat historical lute, a
handful of music and some rudimentary ideas to approximate what might
have been. I don't want to back down what few ladder steps I've
ascended.
Now imagine getting an early edition of Don Quixote and slicing open
each page as you read it.
My two groats, three buttons and a bit of lint.
Sean
ps. The subject line references Peg-Heads. I respect them but prefer
well-fitted pegs and a well-lubricated nut. The latter is often the
sticking point [ahem] in ease of tuning.
On Aug 4, 2014, at 1:54 PM, Tobiah wrote:
On 08/04/2014 01:16 PM, David van Ooijen wrote:
Jam the gears and dope the pegheads. ;-) Re extended/modern
techniques on early instruments: When you see the Buddha on the
road, kill him. (But it takes Buddha to do so.) Iaw, when you want
to make your own school of lute playing, find your own voice, write
your own music and generally are not interested in finding out
about how to play Francesco, Dowland or Weiss, please go ahead.
I'm interested in how they played, but I like what Jimmy Hendrix did
with Francis Scott Key at the same time. Maybe a little light chorus
effect will spice up a Francesco recording. I don't know, but I'm
willing to try it. I'd like to study all of the old methods of
course, perhaps to better know the soul of the music. So little was
put into the written music to tell us about tempo, strictness of
tempo, dynamic range, tone color variation, and general emotional
intention, that it almost supports the idea that things are open to
interpretation even if common practice at the time had an understood
narrow accepted practice regarding these things. Our ears are in
tune with a different set of practices now (at least the general
public). Perhaps if we looked up from anthropology and viewed the
old scribbles on parchment as a worthwhile resource for music for our
time, lute music might have a greater following. When I explain
that I play lute music on the guitar, I generally have to explain
what a lute is.
I'm at work, so I apologize for the hurried, disorganized thoughts.
But if If you want to play Weiss et al, try and figure out how
Weiss played. If Weiss would have had a guitar/guitar-lute/used
another technique on his B-lute, played with nails, no-pinky, above
the rose, whatever, he would have written different music. Same
argument with 'if Bach would have a Steinway he would have loved
it'. Sure he would have loved it, who knows? But he certainly would
have written different music. The instrument you have, its
shortcomings and strong point, and the way you play it, what kind
of tone production you favour, will influence the music you write
for it. This is not an argument about what way is the best, but
about what your goal in playing lute is. No argument there. David -
loves it all
******************************* David van Ooijen
[1]davidvanooi...@gmail.com [2]www.davidvanooijen.nl
******************************* On 4 August 2014 20:56, Dan Winheld
<[3]dwinh...@lmi.net> wrote:
I hate them on my own instrument because it came with them & I'm
stuck with them. Dan Larson installed them. It was a prototype;
not a built-to-order instrument, and I was damned lucky to get it.
Everything south of the pegbox is the best Renaissance lute I've
ever played or owned- but those abominable, Satanic Frankenpeg
things slip a lot & need to be jammed in with great force to hold
(while taking care not tear off the pegbox). Since this first lute
was built, the pegs themselves- as well as Dan's skill at
installing- them have improved exponentially. I would not consider
getting an Orpharion or Bandora without them, but I still wouldn't
order them for any kind of lute. A I have a couple of the guitar
cranky things, they do work on the lute pegs as well as on my
guitars tuners, but it's still much, much more troublesome to
change a string compared popping out a regular peg. Not a big deal
except for the 1st course, even synthetics are the ones that go the
most frequently. I may change over just that one peg to a
traditional, real peg if I can get someone to redo the holes to
accommodate a normal peg. Dan
On 8/4/2014 11:06 AM, Tobiah wrote:
On 08/04/2014 10:56 AM, Dan Winheld wrote:
I only hate them on my own instrument. On all the others I've
tried, including one of my Baroque lute student's new Larson
Burkholtzer copy, I grudgingly admit that they are fabulous. Until
you have to change a string. :-D
Right. A I have a little crank designed to help with changing
strings on a guitar. A You slide it over the little tuning handle
and crank away. A It goes pretty quickly. A Are you saying you
hate them on your own instrument and so you don't install them, or
that you have them and hate them, but only on your instrument?
On 8/4/2014 10:44 AM, Edward Martin wrote:
aYes, Nancy is correct. A I do use pegheds on my 11-course baroque
lute, and my vihuela as well. A They are absolutely marvelous, a
new revelation in tuning. A One can tune easily, more accurately
than before, and much quicker. A a On Mon, Aug 4, 2014 at 12:25 PM,
Nancy Carlin <[1][4]na...@nancycarlinassociates.com> wrote: About
the pegs - guitar tuning pegs would be so heavy that the
instruments would be listing toward the left in our laps.
Fortunately the Peghead people have pegs that works well on lutes,
vihuelas and orpharions. [2][5]http://www.pegheds.com/ I have peg
heads on one of my orpharions and love them. They look like
regular lute pegs and the tuning is a dream. A They are especially
nice with my wire strings - now I spend more time playing and less
time tuning. A The tiny gears inside the peg are configured so that
you turn the peg something like 3 times more than a wooden peg.
There are a couple of other people with Pegheads on the luts list -
Dan Winheld is not a fan of them, but Ed Martin has them on a
baroque lute and he likes them. I sometimes get a sense however
that there is some taboo in searching out new adaptations of lute
music or lutes themselves. A I've long lamented the apparent
resistance of using modern tuning machines on a lute for example. A
Had they been available at the time, I'm rather certain that the
old masters would have joyously adopted them. A I guess it's like
asking what Bach would have done if he had a pedal. I'm more
interested in what I will do now that I have one. Tobiah To get on
or off this list see list information at
[3][6]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html --
Nancy Carlin Administrator THE LUTE SOCIETY OF AMERICA
[4][7]http://LuteSocietyofAmerica.org PO Box 6499 Concord, CA
94524 USA [5]925 / 686-5800 [6][8]www.groundsanddivisions.info
[7][9]www.nancycarlinassociates.com -- References 1.
mailto:[10]na...@nancycarlinassociates.com 2.
[11]http://www.pegheds.com/ 3.
[12]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html 4.
[13]http://LuteSocietyofAmerica.org/ 5. tel:925%20%2F%20686-5800
6. [14]http://www.groundsanddivisions.info/ 7.
[15]http://www.nancycarlinassociates.com/
--
References
1. mailto:davidvanooi...@gmail.com 2.
http://www.davidvanooijen.nl/ 3. mailto:dwinh...@lmi.net 4.
mailto:na...@nancycarlinassociates.com 5. http://www.pegheds.com/
6. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html 7.
http://LuteSocietyofAmerica.org/ 8.
http://www.groundsanddivisions.info/ 9.
http://www.nancycarlinassociates.com/ 10.
mailto:na...@nancycarlinassociates.com 11. http://www.pegheds.com/
12. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html 13.
http://LuteSocietyofAmerica.org/ 14.
http://www.groundsanddivisions.info/ 15.
http://www.nancycarlinassociates.com/
