>> Originally we had a long discussion through RMMGA on the true history
>> of the guitar - basically trying to refute the assertion of classical
>> guitarists that gut/nylon strings are the only proper type of string,
>> all the way back through history, and that steel strings in general are
>> a degeneration created by industrial production around the end of the
>> last century. With some assistance from Rob MacKillop's researches into
>> the 18th century Scottish wire-string guittar, the final conclusion is
>> that wire-strung instruments predate gut-strung in this field.
>
> If you include the ud in "this field", both were preceded by silk. See
> the New Grove on that; the particularly neat thing is that documents
> from more than 1000 years ago say exactly how many threads went into
> each string, and since silkworms presumably still have the same size
> orifices they had back then, we know precisely what weight was used.
The theory for steel string guitar partisans is that the ud is not 'in this
field' - that the wirestrung ur-guitar migrated from the near east/India
round the north side of the Med; the ud found its way mainly via Spain and
the north African route. When the oud and its music were banned in Spain
after the expulsion of the Arab dynasties, the more northerly guitar was
adapted to play much of that music because the authorities would not
recognise is as an oud (from this, much of the Andalucian tradition). The
guitar certainly had lute-type gut strings in Spain before this happened,
and the oud had certainly spread widely into all of Europe via many other
routes - the Italian luthiery tradition, along with the inlay
work/ebenist/ivorywork involved, is Moorish in origin. So the 'guitar' and
the 'oud' are sort of separate developments almost until the Spanish guitar
which fused the two. Even the baroque guitar was wire strung.
This is just the broad conclusion reached after a couple of months of email
correspondence - some as uninformed and speculative as mine, some very
expert from US academics. Steel string Guitar = wire, originally twin
course, northern med/Europe route from Indian/near eastern origins.
Classical Guitar = gut, single course, southern med route from Arabic ud
origins. Just happened to end up with more or less the same final form and
tuning!
The ultimate conclusion from this is that the 12-string dreadnought is in
fact the purest form of guitar ;-)
>
> (We also know the tension: pitch was given by one of two reference
> standards, "tune the lowest course to the lowest note you can sing" or
> "tune the highest course as high as you can without it snapping" -
> these weren't far apart in practice, given an average baritone voice).
We're not sure about the pitch of voices in the past; one of your problems
with singing anything from 18th c Scottish MS is that the intended pitch is
at least one tone, maybe 1.5 tones, lower than the notation makes it appear,
due to the change in concert pitch to our higher 440=A tuning. So Burns
songs where us blokes have to hit a high A were actually sung hitting a high
F#. Even in the 18th c, it is suggested that the smaller stature of most
people and reduced growth, later maturity, implied that they had slightly
higher pitched voices too. Unfortunately the voice-box doesn't survive in
many remains (major studies of this in pursuit of origins of speech) but I
guess someone must have measured Egyptian mummies in this respect, and have
a good idea of the pitch of their voices. It is quite possible they were 2
or 2.5 tones higher than modern adult males.
>
> Silk is used for lute strings all across North Africa and Asia as far
> as China and Japan. The koto (Japanese harp) is silk-strung, and can
> produce a huge sound.
>
> The ud goes back about 4000 years to ancient Egypt. As far as anybody
> knows silk was used for most of that time. Was silk usable in Scotland,
> or is it too sensitive to humidity? It could never have been very
> difficult to obtain.
>
Do you think that silk thread - raw strands, not spun, would have been
imported? I would guess that wherever sailing vessels or fishing nets were
made (as opposed to coracles and basketwork weirs!) whatever thread was used
for rope might have been pressed into use for strings. Here in Kelso it was
certainly hemp.
David
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