Monica Hall wrote: > > Recently I was able to borrow a cittern for a few months and the advantages > of a re-entrant tuning were immediatly obvious as soon as I began to play > (rather badly) with a plectrum. > > If you are strumming chords it doesn't matter if the lowest sounding course > is in the middle but having treble strings outermost makes the playing of a > single melodic line with up and down strokes of the plectum much easier and > cleaner. The fact that the first and second courses on the cittern are tuned > a tone apart also makes it easy to play passages in thirds with a plectrum. > Otherwise two part playing is almost impossible. > > Until the late 15th century most plucked stringed instruments in Western > Europe were played with a plecturm and I suspect - although there is no > documentary evidence for this - that re-entrant tunings may have been common. > > > I have the impression (from reading what I could get my hands on recently) that plucked instruments in the 15th and earlier centuries were tuned in fourths and/or fifths.
I'm currently in a 'trying to play with a plectrum' phase which I seem to go through every so often. Surely it would be very - and unnecessarily - difficult to jump between outer courses to play melodically. Much medieval music has lots of step-wise movement - running up and down 'scales'. (For example, the over familiar, 'Lamento di Tristano'...the estampies, the Faenza pieces.) I'm a life-long beginner in plectrum technique so maybe more advanced players will say that playing fast melodic lines with a plectrum is easy with re-entrant tunings? Re-entrant tuning is a strange concept. You can get easy chord shapes without it :- the guitar. And you can get campanella without it:- Baroque lute and Russian guitar. On the other hand, I have a rather humble saz and the middle course (of three) is the lowest: it's re-entrant.. Yet saz music is very definitely melodic.(And it has more than twelve frets for the octave. Some notes have more than one semitone.) To be honest, I've not made any sense of the instrument at all - but it's a massively popular instrument. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
