Ken,

Music to my ears.   Sharing me with the Hurdy Gurdy Girls sounds like a grand idea for a Sunday afternoon.

In that beautiful old wooden mill I always wished "the walls could talk", sending back all those vibrations of conversations they absorbed over the years.   Of course the first question about hurdy gurdy woods is "what was really available", and the second is "how did they really get it".   After you have good answers for that, everything else is simple.

The more deeply I get into the study of music history and confront attempts at "historical authenticity", the more I appreciate the human spirit of invention and the other human spirit of confinement or limitation.   Musical innovators have always been at work, and musical traffic cops have always had their say too.   Unfortunately in our modern times, the inventors have little use for the confinements of dogma and the dogmatists have few statesmen from the other side to balance their mental scales.   What wood it "correct" for a hurdy gurdy bearing is one of those silly debates.   It is all a matter of which maker's work one is trying to replicate.   It is all great fun to explore and provides endless caves of wonder for the creation of new knowledge.  Since the '60s when Early Music studies began to become more popular, there has been an enormous shift knowledge leading to very high quality and convincing performances, but also a growing awareness of the constant flow of technology and innovation.   

Recently I attended a concert of Bach Cantatas, all performed carefully and beautifully in "historic style" with historic or replica instruments, but the program list included a "Cobbled Cantata".   The comment from the performers was that they were taking authentic performance of Bach's music one step further, now also creating the music for a specific performance as he did.   Bach was often under pressure from his bosses to have new music every week for this or that event or church service, so to meet the impossible challenges of time, he often grabbed an already written movement from this and a section from that and put them together in a quick rewrite to suit the singers and players who were on the payroll that week.   Hence, the modern players cleverly "cobbled" together some bits from Bach's cantatas into a "new piece", and put it on the program as a bit of historic recreation, not of an accurate representation of a piece by Bach but of his style of working.   I thought it was hokey, and perhaps just a simple way for the professional players to keep the concert money between as few as possible for the most personal gain, rather than hiring more people to be able to do more complete works.   These were the cream of the crop of performers, and they tried to give it a good spin, but the audience was pissed.

Currently reading a wonderful book, "Historical Thinking  - and Other Unnatural Acts" by Sam Wineburg.   He is a psychologist, not a historian.  It is great inspiration for playing history stuff with Grade Three classes and Hurdy-Gurdys.

Remind the Hurdy-People that humans were much smaller then and that the physics of the ear canal means that they could not hear the low pitches we can today.   That should spark some more e-mails to the list.

Cheers,

cp in bc
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Gabriel Orgrease 
  To: [log in to unmask] 
  Sent: Sunday, February 10, 2008 1:56 PM
  Subject: Re: [BP] wood bearings


  cp, 

  Do you mind if I cross post your e-mail on water mills to the hurdy-gurdy list? I'm not sure they will pay attention, but it is one turnign musical instrument to another and they have been rattling on for more than a week now about bearing woods and authenticity of heritage sound. 

  ][<

  PS. Their consensus seems to be lignum vitae. I have been a bit too busy to pay close attention to their detailed wanderings.

    Like almost everything else, what woods are best for bearings depends entirely on who what where when and why.   

  -- 
  Orgrease-Crankbait Video, audio, writings, words, spoken word, dialogs, graphic collage and the art of fiction in language and literature.



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