Dear Tom,
This lute history you quote sounds so compressed that I wonder if
there are important details he left out for lack of space or they
simply didn't make it to his desk. Lutes and ouds could have
disseminated from the Iberian peninsula solely or through general
trade routes throughout any part of Europe. And those trades go back
at least to the 5th century BC. Its mingling w/ the kithara could
have occured often from the inception of the lute. There are
lute-like objects in Roman friezes.
I don't think the word lute is derived from lyre + oud but from
al-oud (the article "the" + oud). Forgive me if I've misconstrued
"...rendering the Greek _lyre_ with the Arabic _oud_."
For some reasons, real or imagined, the lute has had a lofty
philosophical symbolism and that concept seems to be repeat through
history. [I remember reading Hesse's _Magister Ludi_ when I was
first learning lute and trying to reconcile Joseph Knecht's divining
the lute masters' keys to The Arcane Secrets with my trying to pluck
out Packington's Pound.] Is it really the instrument of Orpheus
--real or symbolic? The vihuela could certainly lay equal claim and
in the hands of a master perhaps a renaissance guitar could as well.
(btw, I don't pretend to know any of this for certain or project any
post-renaissance ideals.)
History is a funny thing especially when we try to project what
people thought. There were probably lute masters from every
generation from the 9th century forward and regarding any area,
city-state or employment. They were all individuals who thought
differently and played differently for audiences of different tastes
and erudition. Unfortunately, generalities are inevitable in
imagining what contemporaries wanted from their lutes, players and
art.
Most of them are as different as comparing any real two real people
you know to a textbook description of a human.
"Yet by tricks of fate and language, and through the vagaries of
human sentiment and prejudice, it was the lute that came to
dominate European court music"
Then again, there were those who thought nothing could transcend the
beauty of the human voice (instruments in their own right and
assumed to be perfect since they were created by God and not man.)
As for 'guts hailing men's souls', there are divine descriptions of
Ficino's viol, Francesco's lute and Ludovico's harp as well as so
many players, instruments and moments we'll never know --including
Albert de Rippe and his little 4-course guitar.
History is a wonderful thing but generalities of historians will
never come close to describing the catharsis of one person
transfixed by music --composing, playing or listening-- from
Lachrima to Strange fruit.
So, was it really a philosophic battle or just an evolution of ideas
that surfaced through various people and their instruments of choice?
Sean --the lute/[anything else] dichotomy is a red herring-- Smith
On Sep 4, 2008, at 10:03 PM, T.J. Sellari wrote:
Glenn Kurtz's _Practicing: A Musician's Return to Music_ has a
rather surprising (to me, anyway) take on the history of the lute
and the guitar, describing this history as a mostly philosophical
battle that the lute won:
"Between the ninth and the thirteenth centuries oud music slowly
radiated out from Moorish courts into the Spanish countryside and
so to the rest of Europe. There it mingled and ultimately merged
with the traditions of kithara-playing left behind by the Romans.
Both the lute and the early guitar were thus played throughout
Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Both were
popular and cultivated instruments, used to accompany love songs,
work songs, sailing songs, and ballads of adventure. Yet by tricks
of fate and language, and through the vagaries of human sentiment
and prejudice, it was the lute that came to dominate European court
music, while the guitar became an instrument of the common people.
Like the kithara and the lyra, the guitar and the lute tangled in
the limbo of cultural symbolism, and this time the guitar lost.
In translating the works of Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras,
Arab scholars used the words most familiar to them, rendering the
Greek _lyre_ with the Arabic _oud_. As classical learning passed
into the cultures of Europe, therefore, the lute, and not the
guitar, inherited the lithara's mystical aura. Throughout the
Renaissance, European philosophers, poets, and musicians would
attribute to the lute the magical powers of Apollo, Amphion, and
Orpheus. The lute became the philosopher's instrument, the symbol
of neoclassical humanism, of learning and courtly love, while the
guitar--though more closely related to the kithara--inherited the
aristocracy's disdain for peasants and the Christian philosophers'
mistrust of the body, women, and pleasure. " (p. 111)
Wasn't it, however, more a question of phases of popularity, with
the lute replaced by the viol, which was in turn replaced by the
piano? Was the guitar ever a serious rival to either the lute or
the viol in terms of plain popularity before the nineteenth
century? It seems to me that the guitar is not mentioned often in
Renaissance writings in English, especially compared to the lute.
Does this disparity imply exactly the prejudice of the learned for
the lute that Kurtz is claiming, or simply that guitars were not
very popular?
Another surprising (again, to me) claim is about the inadequacy of
lute construction:
"Renaissance lutes employed a complex system of cross-braces to
counter the pressure of the strings. These braces were thin slats
of wood glued across the grain on the underside of the soundboard
to provide extra strength and stability. Cross-bracing adequately
supported the soundboard against the pull of the strings. But it
also dampened the soundboard's vibrations, restricting the lute's
tone and sustain. Worse, cross-bracing interfered with the
soundboard as it responded to changed in humidity. The stress from
this uneven movement could cause the soundboard to crack, even if
the instrument were left unstrung. This is why so few Renaissance
lutes survive. The instrument's form contradicted its function.
After the demise of the lute, however, the guitar continued to
evolve. In the 1820's and 1830's, a new technique, called
fan-bracing, emerged in guitar construction, and this led directly
to the modern concert guitar." (pp. 139-140)
"...restricting the lute's tone..." Really?
Finally, I'd like to mention that the book has interesting
descriptions of the author's experience studying classical guitar,
and is, I think, worth reading.
Tom
To get on or off this list see list information at
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
