Graham,
I've been formerly an experienced classical guitarist as well. Let me try to answer some of your questions: 2010/3/18 Graham Freeman <[1][email protected]> All, I'm finding this discussion very informative and helpful. I'm also an experienced guitarist and come to theorbo and lute from a classical guitar background. I still play quite a lot of steel-string guitar, as there is just too much great music (Pierre Bensusan, Martin Simpson) for that instrument to ignore. Steel-string technique in incredibly varied among the many different players, and I've learned a lot from watching the right-hand of someone like Bensusan, who has a very relaxed and flexible right-hand technique that allows him to adapt to different musical situations. That's interesting, unfortunately I am not aware of these players. I think that we might learn a lot from watching the technique of someone who doesn't feel the need to be pedantic about it and lets his hands adapt to different situations. Perhaps steel-string guitarists have even more to teach us about the right-hand than do classical guitarists. Honestly, classical or steel string players won't give us what we want, which is to understand how lute music was played back then. The information is partly on the lute tutors, iconography and of course in our sensibility. The thumb under or out constantly being described on this list, refers not only to the crossing of the thumb inside our outside the hand, there is much more to it, believe me... That being said, I find the different lute techniques fascinating. Paul O'Dette seems to be able to use his thumb-under technique for everything, including Bach and the theorbo, whereas Nigel North seems to use a variation of thumb-over technique for everything he does, including Dowland. It's fine, both techniques work as you noticed. The principle of sound production is still there. Perhaps my ignorance is showing here, but Nigel North's technique seems to be closer to right-hand classical guitar technique than many others I have seen. Just in it's general appearance. My questions, I suppose, would be: are we lutenists too pedantic about technique? Should we perhaps adopt and flexible right-hand that can adapt to the many different situations in which we find ourselves? Which situations? Perhaps playing Berio on the lute? Ginastera, Villa Lobos or maybe transcribing Chopin or Debussy? Kapsperger did not even use his (a) finger and his music is full of scales, arpeggios, slurs and all kinds of ornaments. I understand the necessity of studying treatises and iconography to learn more about the way in which the music was played, but surely the surviving evidence doesn't encapsulate the ways in which the thousands of lute players all over Europe played such a popular instrument over the course so many years. Of course not, we would be crazy if we tried to recover the way every single lutenist played during more than 400 years. That's an impossible task. Historical evidence is one thing, but the historians among us will certainly recognize that Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur long ago raised the awareness of the fact that historical record can never provide a complete picture of the past, and that we need to adopt, perhaps, a more phenomenological approach based on our own experiences in an ongoing historical situation. Perhaps that means that a 21st century lute player who plays a greater amount of repertoire than any historical lutenist ever did, and perhaps also plays instruments of which lutenists had never heard (such as steel-string guitar) need to adopt the kind of techniques that suit there situations. Well, what I see today is that people are specializing in one direction, rather than trying to play 4 centuries of music. However, there are players like Hopkinson who does a nice job from renaissance to baroque, I think. I really do favour a plurality of approaches to technique, an approach that might earn me the wrath of this board. Nevertheless, it occurs to me that if, in 400 years, all that is left of the evidence concerning the ways in which the electric guitar was played by millions of people in the 20th and 21st centuries is a video of the fairly orthodox technique of a few, our descendants might never know of the miraculous musical results produced by guitarists with extremely unorthodox techniques such as Jeff Beck (no right-hand plectrum) or Pat Metheny (a three-fingered grip on the plectrum instead of the usual two). This is not true for lute music. We have many tutors available from renaissance and the baroque. Best wishes. Just my thoughts. Sorry for testing your patience with my long-winded ramblings. Best, Graham Freeman On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 2:45 PM, <[1][2][email protected]> wrote: -- References 1. mailto:[email protected] 2. mailto:[email protected] To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
