Hi All,
I am a bit dismayed by a modern orthodoxy about lutes and lute music
which is so dismissive of things which stand outside that orthodoxy.
Whether or not you like Bream's lutes or his playing, he was the first
to show that it *could* be done.
But the main thing which troubles me is that the basis of this current
orthodoxy is so shaky. Modern lutemakers base their instruments on just
a few museum specimens which are not necessarily representative of the
multiplicity of lutes of the past, and while we now make lutes which are
much closer to historical instruments than those of 20 or 30 years ago,
we still don't understand how strings were made in the past and still
can't reproduce them.
Despite much research, modern players have to guess at the nature of
musical phrasing and mostly ignore the very important dimension of
ornamentation, either playing no ornaments at all or taking an "anything
goes" approach. We also mostly ignore the fact that 17th and 18th
century lute players played very close to the bridge with their fingers
plucking almost at right angles to the strings. This has far-reaching
implications - playing more or less thumb-inside and over the rose,
modern players need quite high string tensions, probably much higher
than were used in the past.
We may like what the best players do now, but it is foolish to think
that it is historically plausible, let alone "correct".
Martin
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