The other musician I got a lot of inspiration from back in those early
lute days was John Renbourn. In 2006 the LSA published an interview
with him and I have some spare copies. If you would like one email me
back with a street address - snail mail only.
Nancy
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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