A valid question, Martin, and one which I'm sure we all have faced at some point. And yet we still are interested in playing lute, and in my case, viola da gamba as well. Here are the thoughts I have had on the subject: -I own an electric guitar, and a small subset of the amazingly wide and varied tone-modifiers and other paraphernalia of electric-guitar use. And yet, I also own two acoustic 6-strings, two acoustic 12-strings, two classical guitars (admittedly, my wife brought one to the union) and a mandolin. Why ever for? I actually do use them, often. For instance: one of the 12-strings is C-pitched and open-E-'shaped' tuned. We have songs we do in our family group when we sing out that use that tuning, and by having the guitar down at C I can support just about anything with a capo. (The other 12 is normal EADGBE tuning, at Db, because it's 'zero fret' intonation sucks. Same argument with the capo.) Each of the classicals has a very different tone and touch: on days when my elbow/wrist injury aftermath is severe, I'm really limited to only one of them, skip the rest. I own all of those instruments because each has a place in music I play, even within the same group. So answer #1 is timbre. Sometimes the character of the music demands that the character of the instrument be different. -I play guitar, bass and a bit of mandolin and banjo. I also play the electric equivalents of the first two. There are venues in which electricity is not available, and I suppose I could sell the last kid's college off to get some kind of battery operated rig, but even then, reason #1 does a good job of pointing out why that wouldn't be prudent. (That, and the last kid is likely to beat me up. For an almost-3-year-old, she can do some significant convincing.) There are times when the lute is even more appropriate to the size of the venue, even when the songs are contemporary-products. So reason #2 is venue. Sometimes the character of the room and the size of the audience demands something different. -As I mentioned in the buildup to reason #1, I've damaged my wrists (back when I fell and end-jammed both arms) and sometimes I can't play the instrument that would be perfect. For some of us, it is possible that the low-tension stringing of a lute makes it possible to continue playing after the rest of the instrument world has become horribly unfavorable. This is a weak answer, of course, because an electric guitar with ultra-light strings is far easier to play than any of the lutes I've ever touched... but at the same time, if you've used ultra-lights, you know that the intonation and tuning is a fleeting thing. Sometimes you just don't want to mess with that, plus an amp, plus cords, etc. The claim that a lute was present in every barbershop indicates the possibility that (in places where the climate is more stable than say, Connecticut) a lute can be easier to deal with than an electric guitar. Certainly a friend with a lathe can make a peg turner with a large-enough diameter that gears aren't needed, so that isn't even a reason. So reason #3, which I admit is poorly developed, is physiology. -Each instrument out of the few I play requires a different touch. There isn't so much differences between some of them, and there's a lot of differences between others which would seem to be identical. My touch on all of them is better when I play lots of them, simply because it keeps the muscles trained, the ear sensitive, and my mind focused on what the current axe needs to get the sound I need to give to others. This goes for the right hand as well as the left: you can't have the same level of slovenly left-hand technique on a lute that works on an acoustic. So the diversity of touch leads to reason #4, flexibility. For someone wedded to one guitar and one style who will never have to play with a different group or be asked to play a different style, flexibility isn't such an issue. For me, playing from medieval to (if my younger son gets his way) dubstep, sheesh. Flexibility is its own reward. -A lot of people who play a modern six-string guitar have no idea that they can do things other than what they've learned. Some of them run into someone who plays the same instrument and style who widen their horizons a bit. Most of them just don't. They have no sense of history at all, no idea that the guitar didn't always have 6 single strings, or that 12-string guitars, tenor guitars and bass guitars are not just mildly related, but brothers. Even the Ukulele (tuned like a re-entrant tenor guitar), as foreign as it seems to most is a brother (or maybe sister?) They look upon the Harp Guitar as a weird modern addition, perhaps to be avoided. Just knowing a little about the lute changes their sense of organization of the universe, and I've seen guitar-only friends have epiphanies that bring them from the fringe outskirts of music history right into its middle. It usually starts with "Why do you play so many instruments?" or "How can you play so many instruments?" or even "Why do you bother with the lute when there's electric guitars?" Then I really peak their interests (even if they've experimented with tunings like DADGAB) by pointing out the lute tuning, show them how it shifts the chords over by one string, and that the addition of another string at the bottom widens the range without requiring acrobatics up the neck, etc. In short, reason #5, historical perspective, is valid because you can't really understand the instrument you play without an understanding of how it relates to other instruments, its own predecessors included, and can't understand where it's going (even unto 9-string bass guitars) without it. -Finally, I looked at it from the other end. (I do this a lot, and I hope it's one of the things that makes me a better test engineer!) I started playing lute tab on a retuned, capoed guitar, because I had friends who wanted to sing Dowland songs, and it made more sense to use his own arrangements than to cut a finger off and mount it on an extension from my elbow. (OK, a bit of an exaggeration here, but if you've tried some of Bach's lute music on guitar, you know what I mean.) That took me on a path that ended in lutes. Now, along the way, I learned that this was the equivalent of our 60's protest music, but 300-500 years earlier. So, if I could make up a song about something that mattered to me today, using today's instruments, and they could make up a song about something that mattered to them on the instruments of their time, why not make up songs about things that mattered to me now, using their instruments (styles, etc) and steal a march on my own contemporaries... kind of like what Vaughn Williams and Holst did, but using their instruments? And now, Sting is doing just that, and making money doing it (yea Sting!). So maybe reason #6, innovation through historical theft is as good now as it was when it was plagiarizing your contemporaries. So there's six of the myriad reasons that I believe strongly in the value of the lute in modern times, and see no problem with trying to develop a lexicon of modern theory on ancient instruments. YMMV, of course, and I'll be honest, I don't often _want_ to listen to modern theory worked out on ancient instruments any more than I enjoy listening to all compositions on modern instruments using the same theory. But there are the occasional bright light, and the world would be considerably darker, even through my rose-colored lenses, without them.
On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 7:31 AM, Martin Shepherd <[1][email protected]> wrote: 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, [2][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, `as 08:42, Martin Shepherd <[3][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. [4]http://www.avast.com To get on or off this list see list information at [5]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html --- This email is free from viruses and malware because avast! Antivirus protection is active. [6]http://www.avast.com -- References 1. mailto:[email protected] 2. mailto:[email protected] 3. mailto:[email protected] 4. http://www.avast.com/ 5. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html 6. http://www.avast.com/
