In my opinion, only a handful of extremists claiming to defend the purity of the music would belittle Sting's recording. Even some of the terrifying recordings of lute music by some real bad players on YouTube have a least one positive impact: On the player him/herself. The 'knowing' public smiles at awful performances and moves on (the folks I know do), in no way even these people don't bring down lute music or Mr. Dowland or anybody else.
If there's only one player (and apparently there's one on this list) who was moved by Sting's recording to pick up the lute then there is a positive impact on the public. And as far as the purity of any early music is concerned: Let's listen to some identical Dowland pieces recorded recently say by O'Dette and Hopkinson. They sound complete different and I think it is great that they do. With the distance of over 400 years and the lost knowledge of the time we discover and bring out things in the music that we find remarkable today - if Mr. Dowland or Francesco or whoever had that in mind is nothing to be concerned about. We live the music now and it is the best service that we can do to early music - which is keeping it alive. Just my opinion as said in the beginning. Best Jurgen "You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop" Rumi -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [LUTE] Re: "Sting Effect" (was Direwolf Hall) Local Time: 8 September 2017 9:44 AM UTC Time: 8 September 2017 02:44 From: tristanvonneum...@gmx.de To: lutelist Net <lute@cs.dartmouth.edu> Sting raised at least my interest in the Lute. Mainly because of Karamazov, but still. It also led to "Singer-Songwriter Time Travels", a series of concerts where contemporary singer-songwriters were covering old Lute songs or similar Early Music. This worked surprisingly well. Am 07.09.2017 um 23:26 schrieb G. C.: > Harsh words, I liked Sting"s effort. Karamazow also made a fine input. > On the whole, lute-propagating I think. > G. > > On Thu, Sep 7, 2017 at 11:18 PM, LSA Lute Rental Program > <[1]lsaluteren...@gmail.com> wrote: > > no effect noticed. Perhaps that is because Sting did neither > Dowland > nor the lute any service? Not an "artist" I would have chosen > to sing > Dowland...or anything else for that matter. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
