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.