Good email, David. I had four lute lessons, two from Jacob Lindberg, two from David Miller. Learned enough to realise that these guys could play better than they could teach. Been stumbling on my own for years now. Made my own mistakes. Found my own voice (for better or worse).
I think it would be a shame if we started to emulate classical guitar pedagogy. Every year there are AMAZING guitarists coming out of these institutions, far more than we ever hear about. There is no work for 99.99per cent of them. Most of the ones I've heard sound like wannabe David Russell's. I like the fact that every lute player sounds different. The less streamlining the better, IMHO. We can learn a lot from these newsgroups, I know I have. With a little less bitching, a little more sharing, we could all learn a lot more from each other. Especially now more players are utilising video. I intend to try it myself sometime. How much did lute players learn about music (not just lute playing) in the Renaissance and Baroque periods? As for your last paragraph - there are of course already quite a few institutions with a formal lute programme. They tend to be in capital cities. Do we really NEED more? Rob -- To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
