The Ultimate Instrument

01/09/10 18:22

BAROQUE LUTE

The 13-course Baroque Lute is an instrument of beauty and refinement, possessing some of the
most beautiful soloistic literature among all the plucked stringed instruments. It is essentially an
instrument of PRIVATE performance: it is NOT designed to please large audiences and halls.
It blends well with human voice and is very effective in Lieder accompaniment, but it is not wellsuited for chamber ensemble musicmaking, notwithstanding some very fine chamber music with
obbligato lute extant. It is at its best when played for oneself, or a few of the chosen.

The most common tuning system for Baroque Lute, beginning with the highest string:
FDAFDAGFEDCBA for a 13-course instrument,

TABULATURE is the most practical (and the most typical) method for notating lute music. It is the
form of all musical material found in these pages:
In standard Baroque lute tabulature, each staff has six lines, representing the FIRST six courses.
The course of the highest pitch appears at the top, and that of the lowest appears at the bottom.
Please note that Italian Archlute of the same period uses an opposite system. Do not mistake these
instruments and their respective repertoires, even if the music is of similar style.
F____________________
D____________________
A____________________
F____________________
D____________________
A____________________

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Lower case letters or "glyphs"are placed on each of these lines to represent notes. If you are
required to play an open D course, for instance, a small "a" will be placed on the appropriate line.
For a note with the finger on the first fret a "b", a note on the second fret a "c", etc. The 2
exceptions to this are that no "j" is used, as it was considered to be too similar to "i", and the
Greek "Gamma" is usually used in place of "c" to avoid any resemblance to "e". So:
F_____c___
D_____a___
A_____b___
F_____c___
D_____a___
A_____b___
G - a
would represent a G-minor chord,

All open strings would represent a D-minor chord.

F______a________
D______a________
A______a________
F______a________
D______a________
A______a________
D- ///a

The strings below the 6th course are notated with additional short "ledger" lines: glyphs are placed
below the staff. These courses are tuned in accordance with the key of each piece played:
G- a
F- /a
E- //a
D- ///a
C- 4
B- 5
A- 6

The rhythm is notated in a fairly straightforward manner: It is represented by headless note-stems

with tails [stylized similarly but some regional variations (in spite of some variety the confusion is
rare)], with the exception of whole and half notes, whereas it would be essential to use heads.

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The ornaments would require a special discussion, as many composers used rather personalized sets
of these.
There is a misconception that Baroque Lute is an extremely difficult instrument to learn and play.
However exactly the opposite is true: in spite of it's size and the staggering number of strings
Baroque Lute is a lot more ergonomic than its Renaissance cousin, largely owed to the fact that its
music is generally set up in such a way as to maximally utilize open strings in scales and passages,
and cross-string movements: rarely more than 3 consecutive notes are played on the same string.
In short: it requires a lot less physical labor than all other plucked instruments.
This is what a Baroque Lute sounds like: Played by this writer (far from ideal, 3mb)...
You will find the history of the lute with many images of surviving old lutes HERE.
You will find a great quantity of scores for Baroque Lute HERE.
If you, the reader of this, are interested in actually owning and playing a lute: you should visit
Wayne Cripps' site here (there are many lutes for sale listings) before taking any actions in this
direction:
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute/lute.html
Please be aware that the Baroque Lute is absolutely useless in older lute music popular with
guitarists, such as Francesco da Milano or John Dowland. It is only usable in the appropriate
musical period, i.e. in music from about 1640 to about 1800, with some later exceptions of
contemporary retrocomposition. There is no such thing as all-purpose lute. This writer advocates
dedicating oneself to a single instrument and era, for best and most rewarding results.
The most common student problems are stabilizing the lute's rounded body on one's lap (easily
solved with a strap tied in a specific way, visual info forthcoming), and teaching one's thumb to find
basses securely. This is usually impeded by a wrong choice of bridge spacing, as inexperienced
novices opt for too narrow a spacing, and this cannot be undone, so people get stuck with an
instrument they cannot play cleanly, and get discouraged.
The renaissance lute may be an easier choice for some (with only generalized interest in the Lute),
for two reasons. First, of
all the lute tunings/stringing configurations (of which there are considerably more than just two:
renaissance, d minor baroque, Italian
theorbo, English theorbo, gallichon, and a number of "transitional" tunings between renaissance and
d minor baroque for which there is a substantial repertoire, but which I've never tried and don't
know much about) the tuning is most familiar to the guitarist.* *OK, not necessarily true: the
stringing and tuning for the 18th-century German 8-course instrument called the
gallichon/mandore/colachon is most like the modern guitar's, but there isn't a lot of solo music
extant for it, and the gallichon and its music are not well known. It still might be a practical option
for some guitarists wishing to make an easier transition into the world of Baroque Music. Some
guitarists do very well transferring to Theorbo, because it is single strung, and best played with
nails. Theorbo's soloistic literature is not large, however. It was mainly intended for accompaniment.
Many (but not all) baroque lute players become conversant in renaissance tuning first (there are
even some without any guitar experience, most notably this writer and Lynda Sayce of the King's
Consort).Any guitarist can tune the third string down to F# and read RENAISSANCE tabulature right
off the page. Unlike a lot of other tunings, renaissance tuning is practicable with a relatively small
number of courses -- as few as six, by which I mean there is a great deal of music written in that
tuning for only six course lutes. (Also a lot of music for seven and eight courses, less for nine, quite
a bit for ten, and some for 14-course archlute). HOWEVER, this tuning is useless in post-1650 lute
music: Bach, Weiss, Hagen, Sautscheck I-VI, Kohaut, Haydn, etc. Such music requires D minor
tuning, which starts with a minimum of 11 courses (i.e. the music in that tuning assumes at least
11 courses).
There are many types of shells used in Baroque Lute construction. My preference is for very shallow
ones of the Edlinger/Tiffenbrucker type, as these are a good deal easier to hold firmly, they create
a lot less strain on the left shoulder, and have better projection. Sylvius Leopold Weiss preferred
this type himself.
Another important point is the bridge spacing (see above). It is recommended to have a distance of
15.5 cm between the top and the bottom strings, even if you have small hands. This bridge spacing
allows one to play cleanly.
My friend Howard Posner wrote this on the Lute-Net, in responce to some questions from a newbie:
"....Let me offer a few thoughts.

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1. Be skeptical about everything you read about the lute in

20th-century sources. There's some good stuff, of course, but also a
lot of surmise and a lot of reasoning backward from unlikely
conclusions, as in, "Michel Pudolski's playing in 1970 (or Arnold
Dolmetsch's playing in 1930) represents the historical lute; he sounds
pretty bad, therefore the lute must be a difficult instrument to play."
Historically, I can't think of anyone other than Mace who felt
compelled to defend the lute against charges of difficulty, and the
instrument was around more than a century after him.
2. There's nothing all that difficult about the lute. It's a piece of
cake compared to the baroque trumpet. Even I can play it decently on a
good day. True, my last good day was during the Clinton years, but you
get the point. There's some lute music I wouldn't even attempt, but
that doesn't make lute music generally too difficult. Not every
violinist can play Paganini.
3. A growing virtuoso literature does not cause an instrument to
decline; rather it's a sign that there's a growing number of virtuosos,
representing, one would think, the growing tip of a growing iceberg of
competent but non-virtuoso players.
4. If increased difficulty causes an instrument's extinction, the lute
would have gone the way of the pteranodon before 1600. The instruments
got bigger and more complex, but I don't think the music got
intrinsically more difficult in the 18th century.
5. The reasons for the lute's disappearance from European art music
are not simple, especially since it may not have disappeared from every
place at the same time for the same reason. There are all kinds of
trends you can look to: I think the movement of music out of
aristocratic drawing rooms and into larger public spaces, and the
decline of basso continuo and rise of keyboard-specific written-out
accompaniment, would have moved the lute from the mainstream to the
margin. Perhaps the lute was associated with an aristocracy that was
becoming an endangered species after the French Revolution. The last
thing I would look to is something inherent in the solo music, which is
what most players think of these days, but was only a part of what lute
players did when the lute was contemporary with its music."

So if all you want to do is play French or German baroque music, it is a waste of time to start with
renaissance
tuning. But few players make this decision when they're starting out. You should know what you are
getting into. The world of Lutes is complicated. It is important to acquaint oneself with the
recordings of the masters. Lutenistic practice reached considerable heights in recent years, thanks to
several world-class lutenists:
Robert Barto
Eduardo Egez
Edin Karamazov
Luca Pianca
and many others, such as Hopkinson Smith, Axel Wolf, Nigel North, Stephen Stubbs, Richard Stone,
Pascal Monteilhet, Ariel Abramovich, Evangelina Mascardi, Luciano Contini et alia.

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