I suspect many of us got what we know about Baroque guitar stringing
mainly through the work of James Tyler. Here we have much of the evidence
to make up our own minds. Or rather, it doesn't look like the evidence is
strong enough to make up our minds about very much!
Well ...I don't want to start a lengthy discussion on this yet again as it
has been discussed endlessly before.
However, I wrote this booklet for the Lute Society which is rather longer
and more detailed. At the end there are tables listing the sources
chronologically by place of origin with a summary of what they say - so you
could buy a copy price £2.50 I think. When Rob invited me to put something
on his Music in Time web site I did a much shorter version - just the texts
and translations with some illustratiions and very brief comments. Since
then I have done a more
detailed version of that version which Tom Heck is going to put on a web
site devouted to the guitar - but he hasn't done so yet...I'll let you know
when he does.....
The idea was to make available as much of the evidence as possible in one
place as most people don't have a chance to see these things themselves.
Then they
could make up their own minds...
Once you do that there are is the whole question of how you evaluate what
the sources say...Are they accurate? Did the guy that wrote the book know
what he was talking about? Did everyone who read the book agree with what
it says? How far is information in one source relevant to
another? And so on ad infinitum.
Monica, would it be pernickety to suggest that what you call the
'conventional tuning' has three possibilities. The Ribayez extract says
that the bourdons were usually placed on the treble side of the course -
implying of course, that they could have been the other way - the 'usual'
way (i.e.as on lutes..and vihuelas?). So for the fifth 'course' :- aA, Aa
....AA as a third possibility as suggested by Sanz (for 'noisy' music)?
(and ditto fourth course)
If you want a yes and no answer ...I can't give you one. What Ribayaz says
suggests that it was usual to put the treble string on the thumb side of the
course and it would therefore be unusual to do otherwise. However I think
that the fact that as late as the middle of the 18th century the guitar was
still strung like this when it wasn't really necessary for the kind of music
written then suggests that it is very characteristic of the instrument.
> I think the implicit conclusion that you are drawing from all this is
simply: stringing varied a lot.
Well...that is what Sanz says...there were different ways of stringing and
different people have different ideas about what works best...human beings
are like that...We can just do the same.....
But would it be possible to sum up what
positive evidence there is, perhaps in the form of a table. For example,
for Sanz, at least at the time he wrote the extract you translate, he
would definitely prefer a re-entrant tuning. And you could have a
distinction between 'explicitly stated' and 'implied'. Sanz seems pretty
explicit whereas Guerau's instructions definitely imply a 'conventional'
tuning.
Sanz says that the re-entrant tuning is best for "the modern way of
composing", but octave stringing is better for accompanying a bass line.
But perhaps you'd rather let your readers do the work.
Well...that was the idea, but then poeple keep interpreting what I have said
in ways which are completely different from what I intended....C'est la
vie...
Monica
To get on or off this list see list information at
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
