Lute

• 1. Introduction

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  The lute is a plucked string instrument with a neck and a deep round back enclosing a hollow cavity. A cylinder seal dating from about 3100 BC, now held by the British Museum, shows what is thought to be a woman playing a stick lute. That single image stretches the instrument's lineage across more than five thousand years. The lute is the kind of instrument that asks for patience. Around 1720, the writer Matheson put it sharply. If a lute-player has lived eighty years, he wrote, surely sixty of them were spent tuning. So what does it take to make an instrument this delicate, with up to thirty-five strings, that can fall silent for a century and then return? And how did a short almond-shaped body travel from Bactria to a Norman chapel in Palermo and into the suites of Johann Sebastian Bach?

• 2. A Name From The Wood

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  Al-ʿoud, the Arabic phrase behind both lute and oud, literally means the wood. It may point to the wooden plectrum used to play the oud, to the thin strips of wood that form the back, or to the wooden soundboard that set it apart from instruments with skin-faced bodies. Eckhard Neubauer, a music scholar, proposed that oud borrowed from the Persian word rōd or rūd, meaning string. The archaeomusicologist Richard J. Dumbrill traced rud further back, to the Sanskrit rudrī, meaning string instrument, carried into Arabic and European tongues through a Semitic language. Semitic language scholars offer a different root. They link the Arabic ʿoud to Syriac ʿoud-a, meaning wooden stick and burning wood, cognate to the Biblical Hebrew ūḏ, a stick used to stir logs in a fire. Henry George Farmer noticed one more echo, between al-ʿūd and al-ʿawda, the return of bliss. The instrument's earliest evidence, though, predates any of these words.

• 3. From Babylon To Bactria

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  Curt Sachs, writing in 1941, defined the lute by its body and a neck that both serves as a handle and stretches the strings beyond the body. By that measure even the fiddle counted, as a bowed lute. Sachs split the family by length. The long lutes were the more ancient, and the tanbūr preserved the outer look of the old lutes of Babylonia and Egypt. He further divided long lutes into a pierced type, where a stick neck ran through the body, and a long-neck type with an attached neck. Dumbrill documented more than three thousand years of pictures of lutes across Mesopotamia in his book The Archaeomusicology of the Ancient Near East. He traced necked chordophones through Indian, Greek, Egyptian, Iranian, Hittite, Roman, Bulgar, Turkic, Chinese, and Armenian cultures, naming the pandura and the tanbur among the long lutes. East of Mesopotamia, in Bactria and Gandhara, the short-necked line developed into a short almond-shaped lute. Sachs called the Gandhara lute the venerable ancestor of the Islamic, the Sino-Japanese, and the European lute families. He described it with a pear-shaped body tapering toward a short neck, a frontal stringholder, lateral pegs, and either four or five strings. That almond shape was about to acquire a new name.

• 4. The Barbat And The Moors

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  Under the Sasanians, who ruled from 224 to 651, the short almond-shaped lute from Bactria came to be called the barbat or barbud. From it grew the Islamic world's oud. When the Moors conquered Andalusia in 711, they carried their ud into a land that had already known a Roman lute tradition, the pandura. During the 8th and 9th centuries musicians poured into Iberia from across the Islamic world. Among them was Abu l-Hasan 'Ali Ibn Nafi', who lived from 789 to 857, trained under Ishaq al-Mawsili in Baghdad, and was exiled to Andalusia before 833. He has been credited with adding a fifth string to his oud and founding one of the first music schools in Córdoba. By the 11th century Muslim Iberia had become a hub for making instruments. These goods drifted to Provence, shaping French troubadours and trouvères, and reached the rest of Europe. While Europe took up the lute, the oud stayed central to Arab and Ottoman music. A second crossing ran through Sicily, where Byzantine or Muslim musicians brought the instrument. After the Norman conquest, singer-lutenists performed at the court in Palermo.

• 5. Into Europe's Hands

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  Roger II of Sicily dedicated the royal Cappella Palatina in 1140, and the lute appears throughout its ceiling paintings. His Hohenstaufen grandson, Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor, who lived from 1194 to 1250, kept Moorish musicians at his court. Frederick II traveled to the Lech valley and Bavaria between 1218 and 1237 with a Moorish Sicilian retinue. By the 14th century lutes had spread across Italy and pushed deep into the German-speaking lands, probably through the cultural pull of the Hohenstaufen rulers based in Palermo. By 1500 the valley and Füssen held several lute-making families, and over the next two centuries the area produced famous names of 16th and 17th century lutemaking. The short lute also entered Europe from the east. As early as the sixth century the Bulgars carried a short-necked instrument called the komuz to the Balkans. From there the instrument's story becomes one of growing complexity in the player's own hands.

• 6. Quill To Fingers

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  Medieval lutes were four- and five-course instruments, plucked with a quill. Song accompaniment was probably their main job, but almost no music securely tied to the lute survives from before 1500, since those accompaniments were largely improvised. In the last decades of the fifteenth century, to play Renaissance polyphony on one instrument, lutenists set aside the quill and began plucking with their fingers. The number of courses grew to six and beyond, and the lute became the premier solo instrument of the sixteenth century. Around 1500 many Iberian lutenists took up the vihuela de mano, a viol-shaped instrument tuned like the lute. It reached Spanish-ruled parts of Italy, including Sicily and the papal states under the Borgia pope Alexander VI, who brought many Catalan musicians to Italy, where it was known as the viola da mano. By the end of the Renaissance courses had grown to ten, and during the Baroque era the count climbed to 14, occasionally as many as 19. Some instruments carried up to 35 strings. The archlute, theorbo, and torban added long extensions to the tuning head to lengthen the bass strings, which were placed outside the fretboard and played open. Over the Baroque era the lute slid into continuo accompaniment, then yielded that role to keyboards, and almost fell out of use after 1800.

• 7. Wood, Gut, And Courses

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  Spruce, typically, forms the teardrop-shaped soundboard, a thin flat plate of resonant wood. Its single sound hole, the rose, is not open but covered with a grille carved directly from the soundboard in the form of an intertwining vine or knot. Robert Lundberg, in his book Historical Lute Construction, suggested that ancient builders placed the soundboard's bracing by whole-number ratios of the scale and belly lengths. He also argued the inward belly scoop was deliberate, giving the right hand more room. Soundboard thickness generally sits between 1.5 and 2 mm. The back is built from thin ribs of hardwood such as maple, cherry, ebony, or rosewood, glued edge to edge into a deep rounded body. Frets are loops of gut tied around the neck, which fray and must be replaced. Strings were historically animal gut, often from the small intestine of sheep, and modern makers offer both gut and nylon. Catlines, several gut strings wound together and soaked in heavy metal solutions, served as historical basses and produced a distinct timbre. The strings run in courses of two, except the highest, a single string called the chanterelle. An 8-course Renaissance lute usually carries 15 strings, and a 13-course Baroque lute carries 24. Because the lute is so fragile, very few survive with their original soundboards in playable condition, which is what makes the Rauwolf Lute so notable.

• 8. A Repertoire Reborn

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  Francesco Canova da Milano, who lived from 1497 to 1543, is now acknowledged as one of the most famous lute composers in history, his fantasias and ricercares stretching the reach of lute polyphony. The earliest surviving lute music is Italian, from a late 15th-century manuscript, followed by Petrucci's printed collections of Francesco Spinacino and Joan Ambrosio Dalza. In England, John Dowland, who lived from 1563 to 1626, became perhaps the most famous lutenist, and German keyboard composers wrote variations on his themes decades after his death. French lutenists of the early 17th century developed the style brisé, the broken arpeggiated texture that influenced Johann Jakob Froberger's suites. In Germany the distinctly German style arrived after 1700 with Silvius Leopold Weiss, who lived from 1686 to 1750. Johann Sebastian Bach transcribed some of Weiss's works for keyboard and wrote a few lute pieces himself, though many are thought to have been composed on the lautenwerk. The Hungarian Bálint Bakfark wrote contrapuntal fantasias tighter and harder than those of his Western contemporaries. After a long silence the lute returned with the early music movement, led by pioneers such as Julian Bream, Hans Neemann, Walter Gerwig, Suzanne Bloch, and Diana Poulton. In 1980 Akira Ifukube, the composer behind Godzilla's theme, wrote a Fantasia for Baroque Lute using historical tablature rather than modern staff notation, proof that an instrument from a 3100 BC seal still asks new music of the living.