Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | N | Notes

A History of the Lute from Antiquity to the Renaissance. .(Book Review)-

Article Excerpt
A History of the Lute from Antiquity to the Renaissance. By Douglas Alton Smith. [Lexington, Va.]: Lute Society of America, 2002. [xvii, 389 p. ISBN 0-971-40710-X. $85.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography, index.

Few musical instruments have had such a history of both favor and neglect as the lute. Plucked string instruments of various sorts were popular in much of Europe beginning in the Middle Ages; iconographical and archival sources indicate that the lute was well established in Spain from the ninth century A.D. on, spreading into southern Italy and from there northward. The written repertoire begins around the year 1500 and from that time the lute enjoyed a period of nearly 250 years of intense creative activity throughout Europe--Douglas Alton Smith calculates that there are some forty thousand independent compositions for the lute in manuscripts and printed tablatures from the Renaissance and baroque (p. 301). By my estimate there are nearly five thousand individual pieces, not counting reprints, in the printed repertoire for lute in the sixteenth century alone (see Appalachian State University Libraries, Music Library, "Sixteenth-Century Lute Tablatures," www.library.appstate.edu/music/lute/lutelst.html, acces sed 27 February 2003). In addition to the solo literature, the use of the lute and related instruments in ensembles and as an accompaniment to the voice was common, especially in the baroque, and there is hardly a genre of music during the period that lutenists did not influence. One thinks especially of the lute's role in stylized...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!