The Magical Lute

Stephanie V Sears
February 2023

Urs Langenbacher in his workshop, Fussen, Germany

The lýra of Orphéfs

…and one may see among the stars the Lyre, its arms spread apart in heaven, with which in time gone by Orpheus charmed all that his music reached…

Marcus Manilius, astrologer

The spell

With infinite caution, I carry my Stephen Gottlieb Baroque lute on Paris’ public transportation, on my way to my lute lesson. The lute is light, (an eleven course lute may be a little over 1.50 kilogram). Even in the non-descript traveling case, the body’s particular pear convex shape and angled neck are evident. Fellow travelers sidle up: what kind of instrument is this? Typically, their eyes soften as they exhale an aah. Suddenly released from their daily ‘metro, boulot, dodo’ [1] routine, the mere mention of the word ‘lute’ projects them into a world of utmost loveliness. As a felicitous side effect, I, myself, become, in their eyes, a lute virtuoso – a misapprehension I haven’t the courage to refute.

No doubt, other musical instruments induce equal fascination. But in my view, the lute is unrivaled. In form, in resonance, by virtue of its antiquity and cultural ties to the Orphic lyre or kithara, (frequently referred to as a lute), it possesses unparalleled seduction and by a close alliance with the human psyche reconnects it to a universal harmony.

In Romain Gary’s short story, entitled ‘The lute’ (Le luth), the featured instrument is, in fact, a six-string Turkish oud, (or Al-Oud, commonly acknowledged as the closest non-European relative of Europe’s Renaissance and Baroque lute). A sensitive French ambassador singles it out in an Istanbul shop. To conclude the sale, the antiques dealer makes his son play the oud. Smitten by the music’s timeless charm, the diplomat acquires the lute and the roles become reversed. Becoming the lute’s plaything, the ambassador notes: “Only string instruments unite beauty of sound to that of shape. In fact, art objects lack the means to express through sound and song, the artistic emotion, joy, romantic tenderness of one who holds them.” [2] He also discovers an occult quality in the lute that distinguishes it from other artifacts: “It is all at once a musical instrument , an art object and something living.” [3]

To elucidate the tenet of my own fascination for the lute, I resorted to analogies such as the cadence of a Hanoverian horse performing dressage, rubies scattered across a swath of crimson velvet, David Bowie’s vocal shifts between tenor and baritone.

Analogies, however, cannot fully describe that woodsy archaism still binding the lute to the living tree, or that angelic clarity of tone, that Jupiterian grandeur, that ineffable dreaminess. Perhaps the lute’s contrasting resonances exist because, indeed, the paper-thin wood body embodies the universe. It is no wonder to me, therefore, that European lute music spanning the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries – like a portal to the ineffable – touches the deepest recesses of our consciousness with feelings of inexplicable, nostalgic bliss.

Origins and avatars of the lute

“For Orpheus’ lute was strung with poets’ sinews…..”
(The Two Gentlemen of Verona/Shakespeare)

In the greater lute family, there are two fundamental ancestral lines: the long-necked and the short-necked lute. From the latter, the European lute appears to have most closely evolved. Though one must keep in mind that the instrument, as we know it in Europe, probably emerged in less linear fashion than can be truthfully ascertained.

L’Abbe Breuil (Henri Edouard Prosper Breuil, (priest, archaeo-ethno-geologist), suggested that the lute went back to the moving sands of prehistory with a possible (though contested) representation, in the Trois Freres Cave, in France, of a string instrument dating back to 13000 BC. At least, the supposition demonstrates how ancient the lute, albeit in its simplest form, is presumed to be, and how such antiquity leaves ample room for speculation.

The Bible’s Book of Psalms mentions a ten-string instrument: a Hebrew harp or nebal, alternately translated as lyre, psaltery, lute. Already then, the lyre/lute has a double identity as musical instrument and symbol of the Ten Commandments. Lamech, fifth or sixth grandson of Adam, is mentioned in the Torah as the instrument’s inventor; his son, Jubal, as inventor of the oud, or a related instrument called Rebec.

An Akkadian (Mesopotamian) seal, anterior to 3000 BC, shows a small bodied, long-necked lute-like instrument, considered to be the lute’s ‘oldest representation’. Though doubt looms again…. Did the lute originate in Mesopotamia, or among a people in the Caucasus, called the Hurrians?

Around 2000 BC, appear in Central Asia more frequent representations of short-necked, ovoid-shaped lutes, distinct from the small rectangular-shaped, long-necked lutes seen in Early Mesopotamia; suggesting a direct line to the oud and so, to the European lute. In this perspective, the Persian Barbat appears as precursor to the lute, as well as to the Chinese Pipa (reaching China around 200BC-617AD) and the Japanese Biwa (by the eighth century).

The historical itinerary of the oud is punctuated by the names of Al Nadr, credited for crafting the first oud, replacing the soundboard’s skin with wood, and importing it from the city of Al Hira, in Iraq, to Mecca by the end of the sixth century. Al-Kindi is said to have designed the first ribs of the oud’s sound box by the ninth century. The musician/ poet, Ziryab, at the Court of Abd ar-Raahman II, in Cordoba, is said to have added a fifth string to the oud.

A linear progression through time and space, is, however, once again, complicated by another influence from the Indo-European nomadic Kushans of the Kushan Empire  (northern India, Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and Pakistan).

By 1500 BC the lute had appeared in Egyptian New Kingdom iconography, often shown played by women, as was to be the case centuries later in Europe.

For how the European lute came to be, one is therefore tempted to say that bets are open, and that the lute probably impressed itself on Europe’s cultural palimpsest through multiple crisscrossings.

The commonly accepted transmission pattern, leading to the European lute, is Arabic and Moorish, during the invasion of Iberia in the eighth and ninth centuries; and during the Saracen rule of Sicily until the eleventh century (1091 marking the end of the emirate rule). Thereafter, under Norman rule, the Sicilian court was marked by a conspicuous devotion to poetry and lute music. Following in his father Frederic II’s footsteps, Manfred of Hohenstaufen became a lute-player. At the end of the thirteenth century and Norman reign, the court lute players left for the mainland, making the lute ubiquitous throughout Italy.

Other sources of influence and transmission had, however, appeared by the seventh century: a short-necked lute, named Kobuz, introduced by the Bulgars to the Balkans.

Christopher Page notes [4] that, between the fifth and twelfth centuries, successive waves across the Eurasian plains, of Alemanni, Goths, Vandals, Franks, Lombards, Saxons, Jutes, Huns, must be taken into account for a more layered understanding of the lute’s diffusion.

Agreeing with this view, musical anthropologist, Olivier Féraud, [5] contests the popular notion that the European lute is derived from the oud, owing nothing to the development of lute-like instruments within its own cultural zone. In his research on the Carolingian-Romanesque period and study of what he terms ‘chordophones’, (the word ‘lute’ implying a direct link to the mid-eastern word oud, meaning ‘wood’), Féraud notes that plucked instruments with a neck, (usually three-stringed), were already known in seventh century Europe before the introduction of the Arab oud, as illustrated in the thirteenth century manuscript of 420 songs known as the ‘Cantigas de Santa Maria’. However tenuous the resemblance of these chordophones – showing great variations in neck length and body shape -to the lute, as we know it, they are today classified as ‘lutes’. Féraud relates these chordophones to instruments of Graeco-Roman Antiquity.

According to Roman history Professor Christophe Vendries, and on the strength of a lute found in an Egyptian tomb in Antinopoolis, the Romans modified the Egyptian lute during their six hundred year rule in Egypt. They replaced the soundboard skin with wood, added a bridge and tuning pegs. In early representations, the Roman Pandura, alternately, short, or long necked, bears a strong resemblance to ancient Egyptian lutes and dates back to the first century AD – beginning of the second century; the original instrument having had a turtle shell for a sound box as described for the lyre in Hellenic mythology. Popular in 5AD Christian Egypt, it was simultaneously found across western Europe. Relying on a number of representations, Christophe Vendries notes that a short-necked lute with frontal pegs, in stark contrast to the bent peg box on the Persian Barbat, was in fact known in Europe well before the oud. And that it may have spread eastward, instead of the commonly accepted east to west dispersal movement.

During the Carolingian Renaissance, a short-necked, pear-shaped three string monoxyle lute, (carved from a single piece of wood), appears in several versions, from the eighth to the fifteenth century, linking it either to Arabic (often identified as such by a skin soundboard) or to Byzantine influence. In the ninth century, however, some lute shapes recall more closely the lyre of Antiquity. Plucked with the fingers, as opposed to the overwhelming Asian use of the plectrum, such lyre-like lutes are found across the West by the 10th century.

Therefore, a linear narration leading us to the European lute seems implausible. More so, in light of a cultural rivalry seeking credit for the advent of the lute in Europe – be it Hellenic, Byzantine, Arabic or Persian. Olivier Féraud suggests that by the eighth century the lute symbolized a power struggle between Byzantium and the Carolingian empire. The fact that most chordophones/lutes were found specifically in parts of western Europe where Roman presence was strongest, but not elsewhere, resolves in his view the debate.

 From forest to lute

“Orpheus with his lute made trees, And the mountain tops that freeze, Bow themselves, when he did sing..” (Henry VIII/ W. Shakespeare)

At what stage in the European lute’s manufacture, does the magic appear? To elucidate the question, one inevitably has to look to the Swabian town of Füssen where European lute-making became a trademark craft, linking this small town (2000 to 2300 inhabitants at the population’s height in the sixteenth century, down to some 1000 in the seventeenth century), and its luthiers, to Europe’s royal courts and major trade cities.

Can this achievement be due, solely, to Füssen’s physical circumstances? The proximity of forests, originally abundant with the yew wood used in lute-making, the town’s elevation and severe winters disabling profitable agriculture; the town’s strategic situation at the crossroads of main thoroughfares: the Alps’ road network, the Lech river, the old Roman Claudia Augusta artery between Augsburg and Venice, to which, in the fifteenth century, Emperor Sigismond added a new road between Füssen and Buchloe. Finally, the proximity of Otto von Waldburg’s court in Augsburg, and that of Ferdinand von Tirol, in Innsbruck.

Or were there at play, also, the more intangible elements of an artistic or intuitive sensitivity to the forest’s shadowy beauty and Arcadian acoustics? In some four thousand years of history, the lute had been the instrument of many religions. Did Füssen’s luthiers craft their instruments with a sense that religious dogmatisms were outclassed by nature’s more penetrating mysticism? After all, the sixteenth century was a time of intense religious strife between Reformation and Counter-Reformation. While lute music was promoted by catholic rulers [6] it was forbidden by Protestants on Sundays; transgressing that rule was punished with the destruction of one’s lute and being, literally, caged. [7]

Luthiers were sought for their unique style of work. Names of Füssen’s best lute-makers, (Wolfgang Wolf, Georg Gerle, Caspar Rauch, Bernhard Stehele, Jakob Langenwalder…. and probably the most famous of them all, Caspar Tieffenbrucker, initially from the Füssen area), haunt not only the town’s history but that of lutherie throughout sixteenth century Europe and onwards. It would have been difficult, however, for an impromptu buyer to find a finished lute for sale in a Füssen workshop at the time. “As far as we know today, lutes were brought to the buyer, not the other way around as is the more usual practice today…” [8]

In the fourteenth century and into the sixteenth century, Füssen suffered a number of fires, until inhabitants could afford to build in stone. Earlier documents mentioning lute-making may therefore have been destroyed. Craftmanship is found officially mentioned for the first time, on a 1430 fiscal document, indicating that luthiers were then earning a full or partial income. After 1634, the craft was in decline.

Lutherie relied on existing infrastructures of timbering, rafting, road transportation, and commercial distribution. The manufacture of English long bows, a much greater consumer of yew than the lute, and highly profitable for the region, also used these infrastructures. As a result, lute-crafting found itself in dire competition for the wood by the first half of the sixteenth century. Yew was needed for ribbing the sound box, craftsmen alternating strips of dark heartwood and lighter sapwood, for strength and aesthetic effect. Dwindling yew reserves forced craftsmen to make ever narrower ribs and by 1560, yew in the region was gone. It was mainly replaced by maple, while spruce was reserved for the soundboard; fruit tree woods were used in place of more costly, exotic woods sold in Venice, such as mahogany, ebony, sandalwood…

Timber cut in winter was slid down open ice tunnels and floated towards the valley in early Spring. The resonance of colliding trunks could help to select the best wood for lutes; some craftsmen, cutting their own wood in the forest, or relying on a relative to do so [9] To save on transportation costs, parts of the lute such as soundboards and ribs, might be roughly hewn at the spot of a felled tree. [10] The relationship between river rafters and lute-makers was often a close one. Family ties were also helpful at other stages of the business: “This shows on the one hand how tightly interwoven the wood industries in Füssen were, but also on the other hand the diversification in training and choice of occupation of the sons.” [11]

Tools found in a Füssen violin-maker’s workshop: “ …a large wood saw, two carpenter’s axes, three large and one small axe, iron wedges and two hammers…” [12] might also be characteristic of a luthier’s workshop. “Lute-makers had fewer tools than today but could achieve high levels of accuracy…” [13] Lute-making relied less on notes and drawings, than on skill acquired in a familial context. Individuals continued to rely on a network of relatives or friends to pursue their apprenticeship in Italy, before themselves settling down, either abroad, or in Füssen.

By 1606, Füssen’s select craft, received an official code. In this way, luthiers had better control over workmanship and the distribution process. Following Code rules, after a five year apprenticeship, an additional three year training period was required. A final stage followed as journeyman before achieving master-hood. The Code also limited the number of masters living in Füssen at a given time. Marriage, another prerequisite, guaranteed continuity of the craft. By 1623, Füssen is said to have had twenty-seven lute-makers. “ ….the example of Füssen’s lute-making craft, its personnel and materials, its structures and standards, shaped the entire string instrument making in Europe. In this cultural achievement it was the lute-making craftsmen from Füssen who primarily trained and provided those who were needed for the production of and trade with string instruments in the cities, towns and courts north and south of the Alps.” [14]

When seventeenth century French lutenists, in search of a certain quality of resonance, looked to buy older instruments, (particularly from the Bologna luthier, Laux Maler, originally from Füssen), one may wonder what special quality that was. Was it one stemming from that ‘intuitive’ workmanship acquired in a familial context? Apart from applying the required rule of Pythagorean triples of a 3-4-5 right triangle in shaping the lute, was there at work some inherent sense connecting proportion to sound, which made that crucial difference? Did the Euclidian mathematician and the wood elf combine in the person of the Füssen luthier, to magically merge the bucolic and the refined in his instruments? Seventeenth century French lutenist Rene Mesangeau, found that old lutes, made of lighter, drier wood, produced a noble ‘veiled’ tone [15]. For luthier Michael Lowe, French lutenists were looking for a heightened clarity in old lutes, that best rendered the ornamentations and contrasts of French Baroque music:

Probably the most important step toward achieving a powerful resonance was the rediscovery of a lost principle in the choice of wood for the body, the soundboard and the neck. Whoever has played on ancient master instruments will have noticed their ease of delivery and the effortless sympathetic vibration of the whole instrument, as if this were a matter of course. The reason why we say of these instruments, “it’s as if more music comes out, than you put in,” is because of the high proportion of formants which are available to both chordal and melody playing, and their striking sustain. It is in fact the case, that there is an acoustically important material constant in wood, which differs in each piece of timber. These measurable qualities have been ignored, if not unknown, in the entire technical literature of stringed instrument building, although they must have been familiar to the old masters, as measurements on the old instruments have shown. [16]

The lute as magic wand

“Music is a very useful and safe way to practice magic.” (Music, Magic and Mysticism/ Larkin Grimm/2010)

The key to the instrument’s magic must lie somewhere in its form and substance. But the answer remains elusive, as with the attempt to find the God particle by splitting atoms in the Hadron Collider.

In a theological discussion on the nature of the cosmos, [17] the lute was put forth as a better metaphor for the universe than the self-sufficient mechanism of a watch: the instrument entertaining a dynamic relation with the musician, as God with Creation, while a watch functions without any mystical dynamic. Plucking the lute with fingers instead of strumming it with a plectrum enhanced its magic. The relation between instrument and player developed a new polyphonic closeness.

Among the more evident aspects of that magic, is the lute’s extreme lightness and how, cradled against the player’s chest, it seems to attune to his heartbeat. Harmony between musician and lute is perfected through the former’s composure and elegance, as noted by the seventeenth century Englishman, John Rogers, supposed to have studied the lute in Paris. “One must then sit upright in playing to show no constraint or pain, to have a smiling countenance that the company may not think you play unwillingly and to show that you animate the lute as well as the lute animates you….” [18]

The ease with which the lute can be carried and held, its irresistible mellowness and orchestral potential, has also long made the lute a favorite of women and a means to their social emancipation. During the Renaissance and Baroque, the lute was often portrayed in the hands of women of widely diverging social statuses, the strongest contrast being between respectable women and courtesans, and with probably every nuance of moral and social standing in between those extremes. In a way, the lute released womanhood from being a passive recipient of male attention to being an active seductress.

In the sixteenth century, France was notable for famous lute-playing poetesses: Louise Labbe, daughter of a wealthy, but plebeian family; Madeleine de l’Aubepine and Heliette de Vivonne, both aristocrats. Across Europe, the lute symbolized youth and love and lived up to its reputation through these women’s poems, often marked by un-distilled eroticism and playfully presenting the fondled instrument as object of desire.

In seventeenth century Dutch painting, the lute embodied female sexuality, though behind a front of social and domestic gatherings. At the same time in France, it was quite clearly linked to courtesans and sex, as illustrated by a crude overturn of the word luc (also meaning lute) to cul. Lute-playing could help to redeem and include women of uncertain morals in a social group that, otherwise, would have shunned them. Such was the case for the courtesan Ninon de Lenclos, daughter of a lutenist also friend of illustrious lutenist Ennemond Gauthier. Playing the lute, expressive of refined sensuality and intellect, accentuated Ninon’s beauty and wits, and gave her access to the ‘salon’ of the Marquise de Rambouillet. The actress Angelique Paulet, another of the Marquise de Rambouillet’s frequent guests, also a brilliant lute player, held, however, a more secure social position.

The lute was also, in a complete role reversal, painted in the hands of angels and saints such as Saint Cecilia or Marie-Magdalena, thereby evoking the instrument’s ability to combine eroticism and chastity.

Deploring the decline of the lute’s popularity in his time, English Baroque lutenist and composer, Thomas Mace, wrote of the beloved instrument as of a woman and muse: “She has discourses so sublime, no language yet in any time had words sufficient to define her choice expressions so divine.” [19]

French occult philosopher, Jacques Gohory, considered music as ‘instrumental’ in: “… bridging problematic gaps between the masculine domains of knowledge, science and the intellect and a feminized world of fantasy, recreation and sensuality.” [20] Unsurprisingly, therefore, the lute was associated to the sexual ambiguity of the castrati singers performing Baroque music. Caravaggio’s painting, ‘The Lute-Player’, depicts a castrato singer employed at the house of the Cardinal Del Monte, in Rome. Fortunes earned by celebrated castrati singers encouraged destitute families in Italy to castrate boys to preserve their pre-pubescent voices. Some four thousand boys are estimated to have been castrated every year, in the course of the seventeenth century, into the eighteenth. The phenomenon is worth mentioning here because it reflects a certain Baroque infatuation with ‘sophistication’ (as well as resulting from the church and theater bans on women singers and actors). Hyper-sophisticated lute music made abundant use of dissonance – a musical expression of desire – and of its resolution by way of a cadence. In any given musical arrangement, the added notes and ornamentations reached a pitch of intricacy equivalent to an extravagant play on societal and gender roles.

A long list of lute-playing royals and other high echelon nobles extends from the fifteenth century into the eighteenth century; most famously including King James V, Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII, his daughter Elizabeth, Mary Stuart, Hyacinth Lobkowitz, Isabelle D’Este, Louis XIII… This largely incomplete list of royals and nobles infers that lute music was reserved to the upper classes. Perhaps at first, it was, due to an absence of printed music and hand-copied compositions being only accessible to a few. By 1507, the first tablatures, (written out so that musically illiterate people could take advantage of them), as well as indications on how to play the lute, were adapted by the lutenist Francesco Spinacino, and printed by the Venetian publisher Ottaviano Petrucci. In 1546, new tablatures were printed by another Venetian, Girolamo Scotto. One may suppose that, in a Renaissance Venice, central to lute-crafting and trade, the lute was by then also popular among the city’s often artistically inclined cortigiane oneste, and a growing middle-class. In the nearby university city of Padua, lutherie was sustained by lute-playing students. By1550, increasingly elaborate rules for lute- playing were published, further encouraging amateurs. And workshops were fast turning out lutes: : “I believe it is documented that the great lute making workshops of the sixteenth century brought in large stocks of parts such as ribs and wood for soundboards…..” [21]

From the sixteenth into the eighteenth century, the lute’s popularity shifted from one European country to another, adapting to changing cultural winds, and imbuing societies with a sense of poetic introspection and melancholy. It gave the chance to famous luthiers like Kaspar Teiffenbrucker to befriend royalty – in his case, French king Henry II. Admired lutenists like the ‘divine’ Francesco da Milano, John Dowland, were ‘stars’ , traveling from court to court, spellbinding audiences; by the same token, frequent traveling across Europe and their access to highest levels of authority, sometimes added to their virtuoso credential that of spy. In the best cases, musical talent led to international glory and a measure of social equality. Possibly, a lutenist conveyed, during his performances, such a sense of shared human pathos that he also appeared as a social reformer.

For more than two hundred years, the lute was both musical instrument and intellectual symbol. Seventeenth century theologian, Pavel Khunrath invented an object called the alethiometer, a mechanism intended to find truth by using a dial of pictograms of innate meaning, in which the lute symbolized rhetoric, poetry and philosophy.

The lute’s very proportions represented the cosmos and its microcosm: the human body. In painting, lute strings commonly illustrated harmony, and when broken, disharmony. Jan Brueghel painted the lute as man’s internal space. Such emblematic worth was also found in the lute’s Asian avatars: the Chinese Pipa, the Japanese Biwa, the Indian Veena, the Persian Barbat. The Chinese poet/writer, for example, was expected to display a Pipa in his library along with other traditional objects of his trade. And in Mantrayana Buddhism, playing the lute was considered to be a magical rite.

Similarly, Renaissance Europe considered the lute to be, literally, a magical instrument. By uniting poetry, philosophy and mysticism, it could elevate mankind to the divine. Hermetic philosophy of the time, also known as ‘natural’ or ‘magical’ philosophy, sought to reinvigorate stale Christian dogma with Neo-Platonism and infusions of primeval wisdom (as represented by the syncretic figure of Hermes Trismegistos, and Orpheus). Fifteenth century scholar, magician, and priest, Marsilio Ficino, (said to have played the lyre, or ‘some form of lute’ with a plectrum), proposed an esoteric system involving a ‘sympathetic’ conjunction between musical harmonies, the four elements, the intrinsic temper of planets and their movements:  “In his quest for a unifying perspective, Ficino considers the idea of harmony on the three levels of manifestation; the intricacies of specific intervallic relationships in audible music, the relationship of the human senses to specific proportions of fire, earth, air and water, and finally what he calls the astronomical causes of harmony.” [22]

The mellifluous lute was able to associate feelings of happiness and melancholy, as typified by the songs of lutenist John Dowland. It was an ideal vehicle for mankind’s transcendence. Ancient affiliation to the Orphic lyre gave it not only the power to subjugate Hell itself, but to reunite tangible and intangible realms. Ficino compared the sympathetic connection between a planet and mental yearning to lute strings vibrating in unison: “…. The performer’s spirit will naturally attract the response of the planetary spirit, ‘like a string in a lute trembling to the vibration of another which has been similarly tuned.” [23]

Occult philosopher, Jacques Gohory, having read Ficino, considered the lute’s Pythagorean geometry to contain a corresponding geometry of sound reflecting cosmic harmony: “In listening to geometry in sound, the perfect intervals set a framework or limit on unlimited sound and since the specific arrangements of sizes of tones and semitones within the framework mirror the exact astronomical relationships of the planets, the very fabric of creation is brought to the ear and,  in Platonic terms, evokes a memory of the harmonies once heard with the ears of the mind.” [24] In this context, the seductive dissonance so dear to Baroque music, signified the tangible world’s imperfection, while its musical resolution was intrinsically ‘magical’ or divine.

Also partial to an occult understanding of music, Hegel wrote that it was a thinking entity, transmitting its spirit to the musician, while Nietzsche compared his soul to a lute. [25] Centuries after Ficino, Milford Grave [26] proposes the existence of a frequency range perceived only by our subconscious by way of Ribonucleic Acid (RNA) and feeding genetic information to our DNA.

As a fervent admirer of the lute, my personal conjecture is that the instrument’s particular resonance has indeed a privileged access to a higher awareness.

Once again, the lute casts its spell

“Above all, it is important to remember that this music was composed and performed not by pale aesthetes but by persons of passion.”( An approach to seventeenth century French lute music /Lute News 85/ 2008)

In the last thirty years, the town of Füssen has been re-settled by master luthiers. Since 1992; Urs Langenbacher, like his Füssen forebears, cuts his own spruce wood in the northern Alps within 18 km of his workshop; he buys only tropical woods from a dealer. The advantage is, not only monetary, but also technical and aesthetic: “The dealers are using the same sources, why should I pay them if I have fun working with the chainsaw and axes. The great fortune if you are preparing it by yourself is that you have to split the blocks before drying, so you always end up with tops which wear parallel grain lengthwise. And you can really focus on quality and not quantity!” [27] But a majority of luthiers obtain their wood online from the Swiss company Tonewoods, or by traveling in person to Bergün, Switzerland: “The lute-makers are looking for straight, regular and tight grained tops with uniform color. The tops has to be light with a high tap-tone.” [28]

But what is the reason for the lute’s come-back? After all, in a loud and un-decorous world, is the lute not excruciatingly out of place? My lute teacher suggests that the instrument offers a gentler sense of time and voices a universal love that seamlessly unites eroticism and spirituality, humanity’s two essential connections to creation.

Luthier Wolfgang Früh has noticed a growing interest for the lute in the last twenty to thirty years. Lute students have been newly enrolling in advanced lute studies.

James Louder, director of the Lute Society of America (LSA) Rental Program, observed an increase in rental requests during the two year lock-down: from two to three before Covid, to twelve or fifteen during lockdown. These lute renters ranged in age, from twenty-two to sixty-five. Most of them had a college degree, and though lute beginners, were often proficient in classical guitar. Louder believes that the new found interest will last. As a self-professed ‘old hippie’, he believes that the lute can indeed slow down time and regenerate westernized societies and their risk of a gradual dehumanization.

The writer Roberto Calasso is critical of the blind trust that modern life puts in its forward impetus: “The intoxication of participating in the forward march, as if the wave no longer belonged to the sea but unfurled on its own volition, long considered as a generous illusion, ends up nauseating the lucid mind.” [29] In a final blow, he adds: “It is an illusion that deserves to be despised. It feeds only the good conscious of western intelligentsia.” Individuals suspicious of an ‘at all costs’ forward movement, fear to lose a direct experience of the world, far and above the benefits of high technology. Ultimately, warns Calasso, as individuals are rounded up to serve an alleged solidarity with the many, they are fated to lose their identity and become mere process in a mechanical universe.

One can only hope that the lute, as instrument par excellence, of individual sensitivity, might, by recapturing its former glory, serve as antidote to such a dismal prospect.

Two periods of revival are commonly acknowledged to have taken place in the twentieth century: the first revival, spurred by the French luthier and lutenist, Arnold Dolmetsch, and by the German Wandervogel movement. In this first period, the lute, perceived in a nostalgic light, defied industrialized society. Lute performances attempted primarily to recreate environments and moods of Renaissance and Baroque lute gatherings.

The second period, occurring in the 1950s, rested on several factors: the persuasive talent of performers like the English lutenist, Julian Bream and the guitarist Andrea Segovia, the onset of a hippie era and a concomitant interest in folk music, (the lute being then considered by some as a folk instrument), and the advent of LP recordings. In an effort to retrieve that particular acoustic quality, once prized by French Baroque lutenists, focus was given to constructing lutes that matched more closely Renaissance and Baroque lutes found in museum collections. At the same time, many early music ensembles were created across Europe and America, as, for example, today’s Boston Camerata, started in 1954.

In his book, ‘The Early Music Revival’, Harry Haskell points out that interest in early music developed gradually from the nineteenth century on, from a desire for ‘pure’ music as found in the works of Palestrina, Bach, Scarlatti, Pergolesi. Composers such as Brahms, finding inspiration in old scores, and Mendelssohn, resurrecting a taste for J.S Bach, gave it a first impetus. Early instruments like the lute were already being collected in the nineteenth century, by individuals such as the American/Bavarian Morris Steinert, Dutchman Paul de Wit, Frenchman Auguste Tolbecque, Dutchman Daniel Scheurleer…The infatuation was such for early instruments then that it gave forger Leopoldo Franciolini the opportunity to fabricate and sell counterfeit instruments until he was arrested. In the same vein, fake early music was, for a time, performed by musicians Henri and Marius Casadesus, Tobias Nicotra, at prestigious venues.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, anthroposophist Rudolf Steiner, rediscovering Hermeticism, may also have contributed to that revival. In his ‘Essence de la Musique’ he remarked on how the wood used to make string instruments was, in a manner of speaking, alive; its very substance, therefore, actively connecting the individual soul to the universe: “…the wood used to make string instruments comes from vegetals that grow out of the resonating element of moisture, be it soil moisture where roots grow or air moisture.” [30]

Yet, magic in the twenty-first century?! Musicologist, Jacques Amblard, writes that music offers our rationally-trained minds an acceptable opening to a magic spared the ‘vulgarity’ of other esoterisms.

Through the lens of science, including quantum physics, we are, in fact, being (re)habituated to the occult. Since the Enlightenment, the deepening rift between the occult and empirical research seems once again to narrow. One might even insinuate the notion that Renaissance Hermeticism and quantum science are respectfully acknowledging each other and the lute find itself again on familiar grounds.

If composer Heiner Ruland is correct in saying that today’s commercial music destroys our connection with a higher dimension, it may explain why bands like Ayreheart feel compelled to include the lute in their form of modern folk music; or why the lute has been played in less likely folk metal bands, or in so-called ‘Ambient Rock’, notably by Neochika Sogabe; why Sting has sung John Dowland songs accompanied by a lutenist. Are these musicians re-instilling ‘spirituality’ into our modern musical landscape?

While lutenists were once employed to put royals to sleep by playing their instrument in a form of hypnotism,  as did Florent Indret for Louis XIII, or to assuage the pain of patients being amputated by barber-surgeons, the lute appears to return to us as messenger. Is this messenger not putting paradise within reach of our finger tips and hearing, with angelic willingness and without distinction of creed? A feat that no religion, as far as I know, has yet been able to achieve in this dimension.

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Footnotes:

1 Metro, work, sleep
2 “…les instruments a cordes sont les seuls a joindre a la beauté du son celle de la forme. Au fond, ce qui manque aux objets d’art, c’est d’exprimer dans un son, dans un chant, l’émotion artistique, la joie, la tendresse amoureuse de celui qui les touche.” Le Luth/ Une Page D’Histoire/ Romain Gary 2002
3  “C’est a la fois un instrument de musique, un objet d’art et quelquechose de vivant. ” Le Luth/Une Page D’Histoire/ Romain Gary 2002
4 ‘From Roman to Romanesque lutes. Research on the history of Western lutes before the thirteenth century’/(SVMMA2016/No 8)
5 Lute News 100 December 2011
6 “…the lute became the instrument of the Catholic Reformation.” Füssen lute and violin-making; a European legacy/2019/ Josef Focht, Klaus Martius, Thomas Riedmiller
7 Lute News 100 Dec 2011
8 “Individual lutes were commonly ordered from a particular craftsman by a specific client, each lute made according to the client’s particular demands and shaped by the craftsman’s technical style: each lute, therefore, very much an individual creation with its own timbre, much like a singer.” Fussen lute and violin-making: a European legacy/2019
9 Personal communication from luthier Wolfgang Fruh
10 Lute News 70 July 2004
11 Fussen lute and violin-making: a European legacy 2019
12  Ibid.
13 In search of the lute-maker’s donkey/ Thomas Atkinson/LN2004
14 Fussen lute and violin-making: a European legacy
15 An approach to 17th c French lute music / LN85/2008
16 The historical development of the lute in the 17th century/The Galpin Society Journal /1976
17 Four metaphors for the cosmos: a story about a watch, a lute, a recipe and a symphony/angelfire.
18 Harpsichord and lute Music in seventeenth century France/ David Ledbetter /1985
19 Musik’s monument/Thomas Macew/1676
20 Music as erotic magic in a Renaissance romance/ Renaissance Quarterly/ ajeanie Brooks/vol60/issue9/2007
21In search of the lute-maker’s donkey/LN 70/2004
22 The harmony debates/Nicholas Campion/2020
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.
25 Quelques philosophes du dix-neuvieme siècle – le sujet – musique comme eso-terisme dissimulé/ Jacques Amblard/ /2010
26 Music magic and mysticism/ John Zorn/2010
27 Personal communication from Urs Langenbacher, luthier
28 Personal communication from Petra Solinger, Tonewood, Switzerland.|
29 “L’ivresse de participer a la marche en avant, comme si la vague n’était pas a la mer, mais roulait de sa propre volonté, longtemps considerée comme une illusion généreuse, finit par donner des nausées aux esprits lucides. ”  “C’est une illusion qui ne mérite que le mépris. Elle nourrit encore la bonne conscience de l’intelligentsia occidentale.” La Ruine de Kash/Roberto Calasso/2002
30 Essence de la Musique/Rudolf Steiner/1981: “ Le bois utilise en lutherie provient de vegetaux qui croissant eux-memes, reelement a partir de l’element sonore de l’humidite, qu’il s’agisse de l’humidite de la terre d’ou poussent les raciness, ou bien de l’humidite de l’air”

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Stephanie V Sears is a French and American ethnologist, free-lance journalist, essayist and poet whose essays on wildlife, nature conservation, poetry and science, urban issues… have been published in The Montreal Review, Wildlifeextra, E, the environmental magazine, The Cresset, Zoomorphic, The Journal of Wild Culture, Ecohustler, Hawk&Handsaw, The London Grip.

Urs Langenbacher, master luthier, has his workshop in the center of Fussen, Bavaria, in the attic of the historical ‘Feuerhaus’ building which he shares with violin-maker, Pierre Chaubert. He creates Renaissance lutes ( as well as guitars and mandolins) following traditional techniques, and restores old instruments; his work, tailored to the customer’s requirements. He is member of the VDR Association of restorers. His awards include the Master prize of the Bavarian State Government, 1995; the gold and silver medal at the international guitar making competition in Baveno in 2001; the German Musical Instrument Award for concert guitar in 2008. info@urs-langenbacher.de