When we look at paintings of lutes from the 16th to 18th century we see quite a variety of coloured strings. Natural gut colour is common, but some strings, particularly basses, are a dark reddish-brown colour. Others are bright red, or blue, or black. It is possible that there is no particular significance to these different colours (other than string identification,
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The first of the lute books copied by Matthew Holmes in the 1590s is about to be published in facsimile by the Lute Society. Dd.2.11 is the largest of these manuscripts with around 300 pieces. Alongside well-known pieces by Dowland, Johnson, Ferrabosco and others there are many anonymous pieces, some very substantial and clearly the work of a serious composer.
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When I was about 11 years or so old, I remember when relatives came to visit and I showed them my collection of butterflies and moths. They were amazed that someone so young could have amassed so much knowledge about things which were obscure to most adults, but they also almost invariably used a magic word –
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Richard Barnfield (1574-1627), from Poems in Divers Humours, 1598
To His Friend Master R.L., in Praise of Music and Poetry
If music and sweet poetry agree,
As they must needs (the sister and the brother),
Then must the love be great ‘twixt thee and me,
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Like many people, I had always wondered why lute strings look so thin in old paintings. Was it because the artist couldn’t be bothered with showing the details of the strings, or was it because the thickest strings were not as thick as we might expect? We know that lutes were strung with sheep gut (and we have no reason to believe that the density of gut was significantly different in the past),
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I was honoured to be asked to deliver two lectures at Cordefactum 2016, a festival of instrument making organised every two years by the Centrum voor Muziekinstrumentembouw. It was held at the Stedelijke Conservatorium in Mechelen in Belgium over the weekend of 18th – 20th March. Mechelen is a beautiful city with an illustrious past – it was a regional capital in the early 16th century and has many beautiful historical buildings,
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The three sources of this piece (the others are Herbert f.4v. and Dd.9.33 f.70v.) give very similar texts. In Add.3056 it is followed by a galliard with the text “Ga: to the pavan before” but the galliard is in D major and elsewhere (Dd.5.78.3 f.58) it is associated with a different pavan in D major which seems a more likely pairing.
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The most basic materials for a composer to work with – the hexachord. The first piece is by Alfonso Ferrabosco, from the Hirsch lute book (BL MS Hirsch M 1353, f.64v. and also found in Dd.2.11, f.54v.).
The second is something of a blockbuster by Diomedes (Cato) of Venice,
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Courante by Monsieur Saman, and a related Volta.
René Saman (fl. 1610-31), lutenist to Louis XIII, is known to us only from a few courantes in publications by Robert Dowland, Robert Ballard, Jean-Baptiste Besard, and Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s lute book. This is perhaps his best known piece, as it appeared in Robert Dowland’s Varietie of Lute Lessons (1610).
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