Daniel Shoskes wrote: > Since learning to play the lute for the past 2 years, my interest and > enjoyment of classical guitar has surprisingly declined. I can barely > listen to recordings of lute transcriptions on guitar. The tone and > interpretations now sound incredibly anachronistic to me. The > "classical" composers that I played with enjoyment (Sor, Giuliani) now > sound simplistic and predictable compared to other contemporaries. > Pretty much the only classical guitar and now enjoy is by 20th century > composers (Brouwer, Britten) and the occassional brilliant > interpretation of earlier music
I'm afraid you're suffering from MCS, or "Musical Convert Syndrome." In the secondary, or "convert," stage, the subject has found something that sounds right and thus feels that other things sound wrong. The symptoms tend to be less severe with the passage of time, as you pass into the tertiary, or "Oh, what the hell" stage. It's possible you'll continue to experience non-specific irritation listening to Dowland on guitar, but it's also possible that you'll be able to enjoy it on its own terms (just as I enjoy Wendy Carlos' electronic versions of Bach), or even learn something from the guitarist's approach. Indeed, since the lute world is going to become more standardized as the instrument is educationally mainstreamed, it will be useful to have what is fast becoming an outsider's approach. And if you stay away long enough, it will sound exotic when you come back. Sor and Giuliani were surely not Beethoven, Schubert, or Mendelssohn, but their music has its charms, and in time you'll have no trouble appreciating them. If you want to speed the process, spend a bit of time with their contemporaries who weren't Beethoven, Schubert, or Mendelssohn. HP To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
