Hello Marion,
You ask about my favourite tuning for the alt. I have only ever used that in G,
as a major
interest is renaissance / archlute repertoire. Undoubtedly, the Dm tuning is
very
convenient for 11c baroque repertoire, though the pieces I have transcribed work
with 8s/
10s tenors in E with only occassional modification of the bass line and
problems with
internal harmonies. A Yepes-type re-entrant tuning on 9&10 would solve a lot of
left-
hand awkwardness. I prefer to play baroque, either on an alt in G, or a tenor in
F sharp,
used as transposing instuments. I feel this brightens the sound. Incidentally,
what strings
do you use for your Dm tuning? I use Hannabach medium tension for my alt in G.
Have you found the Dalla Casa piece in the Thomas Schall website?
All the autobiographical material I have read on Laplace, Lagrange and Legendre
has
concentrated on their scientific careers, with nothing, as far as I can recall,
on their
cultural
interests. I would be suprised if they had no musical interests, but the lute
was very much
in decline during their careers. At the French court, before the revolution,
there was an
amount of experimentation on lute/guitar hybrids. I wonder if any of these
prominent
mathematical physicists were ever called upon to offer advice on acoustics? At a
Lute
Society meeting in London a couple of years ago, a speaker indicated that books
on
playing the (baroque) lute were still being published in Germany in the early
nineteenth
century, so, perhaps the lute did not die as quickly/completely as usually
supposed. Other
than wondering if Mertz came across any of these, and thereby came up with his
"romantic" tuning, which takes the bottom four courses of a 13c lute to add to a
standard
6s, it is perfectly possible that the lute may have had some role in their
households.
A concerto for domra...?
Kind regards,
James.