>> My point is not that he is good, in your girlfriend's sense of the >> term, but that he is popular, more popular than your girlfriend or >> I will ever be, and he is using that popularity to introduce a >> "wider audience" to the lute which is what so many on this list say >> they want. > > It's certainly true that Sting has brought the lute to a wider > audience, but I wonder how much of that audience will even remember > the lute a year from now. On two occasions in the last two months > I've heard Sting and his lute described over the media as "Sting and > his "f--king lute." Quite possibly the whole Labyrinth thing is > beginning to bore people... > > Sting has created a short-lived sort of parallel universe in which a > lute is "that thing that Sting plays." IMO the lute world (or, as > our Exhalted Empress would put it: "the known lute world" ;-)) will > continue on its course as if Sting never existed. > David Rastall Which empress??? Just what fruit will the Sting caper bear is not known, but it will bear something, and things start happening already. Yesterday I taught 2 classes of 19-year olds at NYU, invited by a poet-friend who teaches a History of Culture course which touches on the "mystification as a literary vehicle". So I was asked to do a presentation on Sautscheckerei, my humble self in the context of literary mystification from Descartes, Chatterton, Macpherson, Merimee, Musin-Pushkin and other fine individuals.... Dan Swenberg (of the Rebel Baroque Orchestra et al.) helped out with a dozen and a half Sarmaticae et Ruthenicae on the Renaissance lute. I played the sautscheckerei myself in the second half- baroque lute settings of and variations on Ukrainian songs, with some originals interspersed, nach Haydnisches Manier, natürlich, as a musical equivalent of Merimee's GUZLA. The picaresque aspect of the event also was certainly useful. But before Sting came along we would drawn blank stares. These kids were genuinely interested. RT
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