This Is Where I Leave You

My Signature project is fast coming to a close. The final presentation is next week and then all that's left is what comes after. For future Signature participants, here are a few notes on things I learned along the way.

What lessons have I learned? 

When I was knee deep in research and digging a whole to China through JSTOR, I didn't feel like I was learning much. My research felt disorganized and unhelpful. But then, all of a sudden, it was April and the project was nearly over. I started putting my final presentation together, and I realized just how much material I did have. It was too much! Assembling my power point was a process of information elimination, choosing what I could actually share in the time frame. I really know a lot more about lutes now!

I felt like my lute knowledge was insignificant because I'd spent the past 12 months immersed in lute word. Lute world is a wonderful place, but everyone there knows very, very much about lutes. It's easy for a newbie to feel intimidated. So when I surfaced back into everyday America, I discovered to my great surprise how much more I had to offer than at the beginning.

The lesson here is to appreciate what you do. Appreciate even the things that seem trivial. They may turn out to be more important than you think. And if you can keep an eye on the end result, the means to it feel a lot more meaningful.

What would be useful to know at the beginning of a project?

I wish I'd had a better sense of what my project was going to entail. I certainly thought about it and I had many hopes and ideas, but I didn't sit down and map it out. That would have been extremely helpful. And yet, I couldn't have known exactly what I was going to do because I'd never done it before! If I were doing this project again next year, I could do it perfectly. Or at least I'd know where to start. 

I wish I'd realized sooner that the project couldn't be as grand as I imagined. I'm a very good dreamer and I dream very big. A little more of an eye to to the realm of feasibility would have eased the process.
I also wish I'd known that it really would turn out well. True, it is not as grand as I might have imagined, but I think it's still pretty great. It's great because I know that my brain has changed because of it and my world has grown.

So, basically, you'll be awesome! . . . And you just have to remember that. :)

At the Met

On a field for AP Art History, we visited the Met. After Greek and Roman sculpture, Dutch landscapes, and getting lost twice in the rest of the European wing, I finally found the infamous "Lute Exhibit."

The lute exhibit, as it turned out, was actually titled, "Painting in the Age of Caravaggio." It centers around Caravaggio's The Musicians, along with Valentin de Boulogne's The Lute Player, and Laurent de La Hyre's Allegory of Music.

The exhibit poses the question, "What did people "hear" when they looked at paintings of musical performances by Caravaggio and his contemporaries?" By setting the paintings alongside contemporary instruments, the viewer can get a closer look at what was going on in the music and culture of the time. 

The painting were created when opera was a fast gaining in popularity and professional singers were gaining primacy. The lute was falling out of the spotlight it had held for so long. These painting seem to reference the fact that more and more, the lute was becoming the instrument of the angels, and less and less what the the everyday musician played.

Caravaggio, The Musicians

 

 

 

Painting Music in the Age of Caravaggio (January 20–April 5, 2015):http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2015/painting-music-age-of-caravaggio

Listening to Paintings Jayson Dobney, Associate Curator and Administrator, Department of Musical Instruments : http://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-museum/museum-departments/curatorial-departments/musical-instruments/of-note/2015/listening-to-paintings

http://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings

Laurent de La Hyre, Allegory of Music

The New Lutenist

An anachronistic Weird Lute Wednesday

--from the depths of tumblr.

The Rule of the Octave

At our monthly Singing Group meetings (pot-luck dinners with ill-tuned guitars, folk songs, and old hippies), I've always been awed at the ease with which a good guitarist can cast aside the "Rise Up Singing" song book, and accompany a song using nothing but some magical formula that told him what to play when. The magical formula is actually music theory, and the guitarists at the Singing Group are just music theory magicians.

The Rule of the Octave is a somewhat older spell, but a standard one in lute continuo music. It was quite commonly use in the accompaniment of songs. It is based on the I-IV-V relationship within a scale, but then it expands from there, providing a framework for improvisation which takes into account the prevailing musical expectations of the 17th century (and possibly before).

There are eight parts to the Rule of the Octave, labelled I-VIII, and each part stipulates the manner in which the performer should play a chord required by the scale of the piece. For example, the scale of a piece in G major would progress like this: G, A, B, C, D, E, F#, G. But just playing all normal, major chords would make for a pretty bland accompaniment. Here, the Rule of the Octave comes to the rescue! It says the in the scale, the first chord should be major (the home note chord); the second minor; the third a 6 chord; the fourth major; the fifth also major; the sixth minor; the seventh a 6 again; and the last major. In our G scale, it would look like this (an uppercase letter denotes major, lowercase, minor): G, a, B6, C, D, e, F#6, G.

I imagine that the Rule of the Octave bears great similarity to many a modern-day blues or folk progressions, especially because the Rule sounds good!

Another Renaissance continuo rule is to avoid parallel octaves and parallel fifths like the plague. They sounded very odd to Renaissance sensibilities. Parallel thirds on the other hard, were OK by them!

There are many more rules in Renaissance lute music, probably as rules as there were lute players, and the rules helped create and mold the beautiful intricate and filigreed sound of lute music. However, there is this thing about rules: "The Greatest Excellency in This kind of Performance lies beyond whatever Directions can be given by Rule."
                                                        ----- Thomas Mace, Musick's Monument, London, 1676. p. 217.

Continuo, the Bass Clef, and the Beatles

Historically, one of the most important parts of the lute's relationship with music was its use with continuo accompaniment, or basso continuo. According to Wikipedia, basso continuo, which was especially common in Baroque music, provided harmonic structure to the music. The continuo was often composed of multiple parts, called a continuo group. The practice of continuo playing most likely originated from the lute's early use as an accompaniment to the voice in song. As such, a continuo part was often an improvised harmonic structure based on the chords and scales used in the song. It was like a modern jazz base section.

My lute teacher presented me with a Shakespearean song setting of "Full Fathom Five" as a piece to use to look at continuo and the bass clef. He is (rightly) intent that I should learn to read standard notation of the the bass clef on the lute. (Un)fortunately, lute tablature is awfully easy to read, but it doesn't require the same understanding of the relationships among notes and scales that notation does, and understanding this relationship is helpful for continuo playing.

So I'm struggling through the bass clef (and actually making some progress!), but my favorite part about the lesson was getting chord charts. I;m familiar with chords from playing the guitar for quite a few years and I've long wished to be able some Beatles songs on the lute. Now I can work on that!

Milestone 4

There is no shortage of material on the lute and its history. A search query of "lute" in JSTOR returns 1,622 results. The challenge is selecting the sources that are useful. It's easy to be distracted by titles such as "The Gendering of the Lute in Sixteenth-Century French Love Poetry" or "The Lore of the Chinese Lute (Monumenta Nipponica Monographs, Tokyo 1940) Addenda and Corrigenda."

I have to keep myself focused on finding information that will help me in my presentation, the subject of which I am ever narrowing. I am now honing in on the Renaissance and English lute, with emphasis on the lute's role in song and poetry (especially Shakespearean) as well as performance practice at the time.

Even with a more circumscribed research scope, it is still difficult to visualize and craft my final presentation. I do know that I want it to include historical information about the instruments and the music, accompanied with examples of tunes and techniques.

Research--

Poulton, Diana. "Graces of Play in Renaissance Lute Music." Early Music 3.2 (1974): 107-14. JSTOR. Web. 1 Jan. 2015. <jstor.org>.

   Poulton discusses how even if graces were not consistently documented until the Baroque ere, they were certainly heavily in use in the Renaissance. Renaissance musicians would have learned graces by ear from listening to other performers in a more improvisational style. One of the main reasons that graces did not appear in printed music was the as yet primitive technology of the printing press. Mass music reproduction was still in its early stages and so besides the lack of efficient machinery and technology, there was also no clearly defined method of notating graces and other ornamentations.
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Gill, Donald. "The Lute and Musick's Monument." The Galpin Society Journal 3 (1950): 9-11. JSTOR. Web. 1 Jan. 2015. <jstor.org>.

·         Gill gives a light recapping of some of the themes in Thomas Mace’s Musick’s Monument. Gill is, I think, overly cynical of Mace’s work. Mousick’s Monument came out at a time when the lute was in steep decline, and Mace was attempting to return it to favor by creating a sort of do-it-yourself guide to lute playing and care. Mace has sections on tuning (he was especially fond of a new French method which made it easier to form basic chords), lute care (supposedly the best place to store one’s instrument was between the blanket and top sheet of one’s bed), and much more, including suggestions on building and modifying the lute. Gill suggests the Mace was an old man grasping at the threads of a fast-receding time. Perhaps Mace was just passionate and looking to share his passion with others.

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Leppert, Richard. "Music, Representation, and Social Order in Early-Modern Europe." Cultural Critique No. 12, Discursive Strategies and the Economy of Prestige (1989): 25-55. JSTOR. Web. 18 Jan. 2015. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354321>.

·         styles of music reflect social class of listeners

o   In lower classes, music integrated with environmental sounds

o   in upper classes, performed music is a distinct entity from everyday sounds.

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Pattison, Bruce. "A Note on the 16th-Century Lute Songs." The Musical Times No. 12, Discursive Strategies and the Economy of Prestige.1051 (1930): 796-98. 796-798. Web. 18 Jan. 2015. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354321>.

·         16^th century lutenist placed accompanied solo song on an equal artistic level with polyphonic song.

o   also gave accompanied solo song a unique style.

·         Rise of education and literacy changed audience. Lutenists no longer played for only the rich and noble, although they still often needed an aristocratic fan base. However, if they could garner enough popular appeal, they might not need a noble patron. 

·         University trained lutenists shared a social group with poets, and this influenced the rise of accompanied monophonic song. Poetry was in the air for the 16^th century European, so it was natural to set poems to music, and this practice sped the popularization of lute song. Indeed lute song became so popular as to pervade the collective cultural consciousness, as evidenced by the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

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Smith, Douglas Alton. A History of the Lute from Antiquity to the Renaissance. Massachusetts: Lute Society of America, 2002. Print.

·         The lute in the 15^th century

·         The 15^th century saw the development of polyphonic playing styles and players discarded the plectrum in favor of plucking melodies with their fingers.

·         Rose to popularity among Renaissance elite because it offered comfortable solo polyphony while paying homage to classical mythology.

·         Almost no music written down until the end of the century. Lute was part of early Italian Renaissance “unwritten tradition,” where players improvised accompaniments to usually well-known, simple songs and tune.

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Lowe, Michael. "The Historical Develpoment of the Lute in the 17th Century." The Galpin Society Journal 29 (1976): 11-25. JSTOR. Web. 6 Dec. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/841856>.

·         Music appears for 7 course lutes around 1580, but 6 course instruments were more popular during the 16^th century.

·         It seems that the French were the first to experiment with different tunings, which became a feature of their music through the first half of the 17^th century.

·         Peaking around 1600, a lute construction style using a greater number of ribs (15-50) appeared. This style produced some of the finest lutes, including the work of Michael Hartung, Mango, and Wendelin Tieffenbrucker. Most common wood for the back ribs was yew, and luthiers made a point of selecting pieces harvested from the point in the tree where the dark heartwood met the lighter sapwood, creating a stripped effect.

·         Flemish and Dutch paintings from the 1620s-1630s show 10-course lutes with 10 frets, both additions to the 6- or 7-course, eight-fretted instruments Dowland talks about playing.

Can a lute change its stripes?

With a little help from its builder, yes. A
"stripey" lute back style gained popularity in 

A yew tree

the early 1600s. This style used a greater number of ribs in construction (anywhere from fifteen to fifty, quite an increase from the typical 9-13 of the century before), and favored yew wood where maple had been the norm. The use of yew was what allowed the striping effect. In the yew tree, there is a striking shift in color where the darker heartwood meets the lighter sapwood. Lute builders selected ribs from this area to achieve that alternation of color tone around the back of the lute.

A lute attributed to Wendelin Tieffenbrucker,
one of the renowned builders of this style. 

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Yew striping effect