Dear Ernesto, Apologies - I copied this to the list as well, I hope you don't mind.
I agree that the most important thing is for music to be "interesting and captivating". Never mind Karajan, much of the playing of modern lute players could be regarded as boring, too.
But we *do* care about "academic explanations" - in other words, historical perspectives - otherwise we wouldn't be playing lutes at all. I think most of us play the lute because we are really interested in the music which survives from the past and we also believe that to understand this music and present it in the best possible way we need to study how lutes were made, which ornaments were played, etc, etc. Whether or not what we do, as a result of all this research, is convincing to a modern audience is always doubtful.
If we don't care about this historical research, why play the lute at all? The electric guitar, in all its myriad forms, is the plucked instrument of today, and it works very well indeed. Better than a single-strung archlute with overspun nylon strings, anyway.
Best wishes, Martin On 09/12/2013 02:44, [email protected] wrote:
I totally agree, but some music is simply boring, even if well recorded, marketed, etc. - take Karajan, or whatever. Maybe in a few years we will hear Karajan and say it is really jazzy, hip, subtle and interesting - but for the time being it is rather boring. Who cares about academic explanations for the way you play, it has got to be interesting and captivating in the first place. And may I beg your pardon, but many of our romantic heroes' music does not sound interesting to me. Ernesto Ett 11-99 242120 4 11-28376692 Em 07.12.2013, às 08:42, Martin Shepherd <[email protected]> escreveu: 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 --- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. http://www.avast.com To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
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