Greetings Bill et al. ----- Original Message ----- From: bill kilpatrick <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Saturday, May 14, 2005 1:59 am Subject: Re: Antwort: Re: S. de Murcia > > vihuelas - in one or two of the many forms in which > they were introduced into the new world, hundreds of > years ago - continue to exist today.
Nobody can make this statement because nobody has a good idea of what the vihuela was. There is iconography, but without accepting some degree of speculation, there simply isn't a body of surviving instruments. I don't believe any modern instrument survives exactly in the form of the 16th-c. vihuela (certainly no currently active instrument looks particularly close to the iconography), If any active instrument has persisted as an exact preservation of some form of vihuela, nobody has any way of knowing it from the lack of 16th-c. instruments that have survived. > the only reason > they're not recognized as such - i maintain - is > because the vihuela, as something distinct from the > guitar, fell out of favor here in europe and only a > few examples survive. ..And whatever was left of the concept was entirely absorbed/influenced by the burgeoning popularity of guitars, in Europe and the Americas. Nobody could have continued to build new instruments without being influenced by the popularity of guitar. > i loose heart. You shouldn't. Just enjoy. > instead of judging what is or isn't a vihuela with > reference to the very few examples which remain, isn't > it possible - valid - to reverse the process and > simply ask where instruments like the charango, > cuatro, tiple, etc. came from? Of course. Whatever their conceptual origins, however, modern instruments with distinct entities are their own entities, not their conceptual ancestors. Early Neapolitan mandolins didn't come to be until the mid 18th c. when the concepts of the lute-like mandolins of the time were hybridized with chitarra battente construction and violin tuning, but my Neapolitan mandolins are not chitarre. > imagine what your guitar would look and sound like if > it had made the journey with cortez and back. would > it have become something other than a guitar in the > process? The ancestors of my guitars did, and the "fossil record" of the subsequent evolution to my 5-courser or various era 6-stringers is relatively whole with relatively little speculation required. No matter how good speculation is, it is no substitute for solid documentation. ...And my 6-course "reproduction" 16th-c. vihuela is purely speculative, but still good fun. Best, Eugene To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
