A Brief History of the Lute,
Part 3
It is noteworthy that although all sorts of sizes were available at most times, the general trend from 1600 to 1750 is towards larger instruments for those in common use. Thus for example, we might expect Dowland’s songs to be accompanied on a lute of about 58 cm string length tuned to a nominal g’ or a’, whereas most French baroque music of the mid 17th century calls for an eleven course lute of about 67cm with a top string at a nominal f’, while the lutes used in Germany in the 18th century were mostly 13 course lutes of about 70 - 73cm also with a nominal top string of f’. Some of this may represent a drop in the pitch standard, but we must also assume that string makers had managed to improve their products to increase the total range available, since these size changes represent considerable changes in the instruments’ requirements. Apart from the development of overwound strings this increase in range could only have been achieved by increasing the tensile strength of the trebles, by making the thick basses more elastic and flexible or by increasing the density of bass strings perhaps by the addition of metallic compounds. (see, Peruffo, 1991) There is currently much interest in trying to reproduce these conjectured developments. It is noticeable from written accounts that the cost of strings was remarkably high compared to that of the lutes themselves, leading to the thought that there was more to their manufacture than is now apparent.
Although seven course lutes appear as early as the late 15th-century, and Bakfark’s apprentice, Hans Timme, wanted to buy an Italian seven course lute as early as 1556 (see Gombosi, 1967), it was only in the 1580s that they became at all common with the seventh at sometimes a tone, sometimes a 4th, below the sixth. Improved strings are conjectured to have popularised this greater range, perhaps providing a better tone and enabling John Dowland, in his contribution to his son Robert's Varietie of Lute Lessons (1610), to recommend a unison sixth course:
Secondly, set on your Bases, in that place which you call the sixt string, or c ut, these Bases must be both of one bignes, yet it hath beene a generall custome (although not so much used any where as here in England) to set a small and a great string together, but amongst learned Musitians that custome is Ieft, as irregular to the rules of Musicke.
The same book, reflecting the growing tendency to increase the number of bass strings, included English and continental music for lutes with six, seven, eight and nine courses. This only ocassionally extended the range to low C; mostly the extra strings were used to eliminate awkward fingerings resulting from having to stop the seventh course. These ‘diapasons’ were usually strung with octaves. Already by 1600 the ten-course lute had made its appearance, shown in contemporary illustrations as constructed like its predecessors, with the strings running over a single nut to the pegbox, which has to be considerably longer to accommodate the additional pegs. The pegbox is also usually shown as being at a much shallower angle to the neck than the earlier renaissance lute (fig.l4), a fact borne out by the surviving original 10 course lute by Christofolo Cocho in Copenhagen (No 96a). Often the paintings of 10 course lutes show a treble rider, a small extra pegholder on top of the normal pegbox side, designed to keep the top peg clear of the left hand and to give a less acute angle on the nut for the fragile top string.
Another innovation reported by Dowland in Varietie was the lengthening of the neck of the instrument. 'for my selfe was borne but thirty yeeres after Hans Gerles booke was printed, and all the Lutes which I can remember used eight frets ..... some few yeeres after, by the French Nation, the neckes of the Lutes were lengthned, and thereby increased two frets more, so as all those Lutes, which are most received and disired, are of tenne frets'. Initially this may have been done to improve the tone of the low basses, but unless stronger treble strings became available at the same time, the pitch level of these longer lutes must have been lower than the older eight-fret instruments. Interestingly, one such lengthened neck survived until quite recently but when it was ‘restored’ this important evidence of the practice was removed. Sometimes extra wooden frets were glued on to the soundboard, an invention which Dowland attributed to the English player Mathias Mason.
It is interesting that Dowland should thus report the prevailing fashion in lutes as coming from France, for by his death in 1626 France was the dominant culture musically and was the centre for developments in different tunings, starting some time around 1620, which led to the 11 course lute. Lowe (1988) has suggested that the eleventh course may at first have been only an octave string. The later surviving 11 course lutes mostly appear to be conversions from 10 course lutes, all done in the same way, by making the second course single and adding a treble rider for the top string or ‘chanterelle’ on the top of the normal pegbox treble side. This effectively gave two extra pegs which were used for the new bass course, but, because the neck was now too narrow, these strings were taken over an extended nut which projected beyond the the fingerboard and were fastened to the pegs on the outside of the pegbox. The portrait of Charles Mouton, a famous player and composer of the period, clearly shows that this was obviously not regarded as a stopgap measure.
Charles Mouton by François de Troy, Paris, 1690
Click here to see a reconstruction of this type of lute.
This final extra course on the same string-length has often been attributed to the invention of wirewound or overspun strings, first advertised in England by Playford in 1664. However there is distressingly little hard evidence that these were in fact much used and they are not mentioned by either Mace or the Burwell tutor even though both wrote about the choice of strings, and Mace at some length. As Lowe (1976) has shown, during the 17th century the French were already buying up and converting early 16th century Bologna lutes, seemingly because of a new aesthetic which valued the antique. There are so few surviving lutes with any claim to have been made in France that it is not possible to be sure what their makers were doing by way of new lutes at a time when lute playing was so important to French musical life. The French cannot all have been playing on antique instruments one supposes. Indeed the inventory of the French maker Jean Desmoulins, who died in 1648, points to a vigorous production since it lists 249 lutes in various stages of construction as well as 14 theorbos both large and small (see Lay, 1996). Only one lute from this maker has survived in the Musée de la Musique in Paris. Alas the all-important soundboard is later, as are the neck, pegbox and bridge. The unusual profile shape of the body though is original and confirms the remark in the Mary Burwell tutor that: “...there is great dispute amongst the Modernes concerning the shape of the lute some will have it somewhat roundish, the rising in the middle of the backe and sloping of each side as wee see the lutes of Monsiour Desmoulins of Paris which are very goode and were sold at first for 20Li and sold still for tenne or twelve. The reason is that the Lute soe framed is capable of more sound because of his Concavity and that the sound not keeping in the deepe and hollow bottome but contrariwise being put forth by the straitnes of the sydes towards the middle and soe to the Rose from whence it issues greater & with more impetuosity. The other have for their defence and reason the handsomness of the figure of the peare the comliness of it because being more flatt in the backe they lye better upon the Stomacke and doe not indanger people to growe crooked. Besides all Bolonia Lutes are in the shape of a peare and those are the best Lutes but there goodness is not attributed to there figure but to there antiquity to the Skill of those Lutemakers to the quality of the woods and seasoning of it and to the varnishing of it. ”
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| 11 course lute by Jean Des Moulins, Paris 1644, Musée de la Musique, Paris E. 979.2.69 Photos by Jean-Marc Anglès |
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Makers working in Italy, where the old tuning held sway, had already addressed the problem of extending the bass range in the 1590’s by the expedient of having longer and therefore naturally deeper-sounding strings carried on a separate pegbox. The theorbo, chitarrone, liuto attiorbato and archlute all had extended straight-sided pegboxes carved from a solid piece of wood set into the neck housing at a very shallow angle and carrying at their ends a separate small pegbox for these extended bass strings. The form of all these instruments is very similar, differing mainly in the length of the extended pegbox, the number of courses carried and whether the bass courses were double or single.
It was therefore only to be expected that this principle of longer, and therefore unfingered, bass strings should also be applied to non-continuo lutes. From c.1595 to c.1630 various other types of extended pegboxes were tried for the bass strings. In one version, an extra piece of neck was added on the bass side which carried its own little bent back pegbox. One of these [by Sixtus Rauwolf 1599, though the extension may be later] has survived in Copenhagen and there are several paintings showing this form.
Molenaer
More widely adopted was a double headed lute with curved pegboxes, (fig. 10) one set backwards at an angle rather like the normal lute, the other extended in the same plane as the fingerboard. This carried four separate little nuts to take the bass courses in steps of increasing length.
Hendrik Martensz Sorgh (1611 -1670)
The lute player (detail)
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Click here to see a reconstruction of this type of lute.
This form usually had 12 courses and was apparently invented by Jaques (English) Gaultier c.1630 (see Spenser, 1976; Samson, 1977) but was not used much by the French who stayed largely loyal to their single-headed lutes. As the author of the Burwell lute tutor (c1670) wrote: 'All England hath accepted that Augmentation and ffraunce att first but soone after that alteration hath beene condemned by all the french Masters who are returned to theire old fashion keeping onely the small Eleaventh'. He, or she, objected to the length of the longer bass strings and felt they rang on too much, thereby causing discords in moving bass lines. It was, however, widely used in England and the Netherlands until at least the end of the 17th century. The apparent thinking behind this form was a desire to avoid the sudden jumps in tone quality between the treble and bass strings which characterise the theorbo and archlute forms. An important tutor for this type of lute, Musick’s Monument, was published by Thomas Mace in 1676, in which he characterises it as a French lute, although Talbot (c1690) in his manuscript called it the 'English two headed lute'. For Talbot the 'French lute' had 11 courses, with all the strings on a single head. There has been some discussion of the usual size for these instruments (see Segerman, 1998) But Talbot measured a 12-course instrument of this type as 59.7cm and the iconography shows all sizes. So far, six examples of this type have turned up with fingered string lengths of between 50 and 75cm.
This same principle of stepped nuts for bass strings of gradually increasing length lay behind a specifically English form of the theorbo which is also described and illustrated in Mace and was measured by Talbot (see Sayce, 1995; Edwards, 1995) . Unusually for a theorbo this had double strung courses in the bass which still further smoothed the transition across the range. None of these have survived.
Thomas Mace, Musick's Monument (London. 1676) The theorbo half of The Lute Dyphone.
This painting below is one of the few to show this English form of the theorbo in action.
Lady with a Theorbo (c. 1670) by John Michael Wright (1617- 1700)
Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Ohio, U.S.A.
Click here to see a reconstruction of this type of lute.
The French too seem to have developed their own version of the theorbo principle in the 17th century with a shorter extension than the Italian theorbo and usually with single stringing. These seem to have been made in two sizes, the smaller for playing solo music and the larger for continuo work. The smaller version “pour les pieces” was measured by Talbot and what seems to be exactly this sort of instrument has survived in Yale. Though now in a form converted to an angelique with some extra pegs and strings, it is substantially the small French theorbo and fits Talbot’s measurements remarkably closely. There are several paintings and drawings showing these French theorbos and they all seem to show them with a long lower pegbox opening with a carved pierced back to the pegbox. The upper pegbox is shown as off-set to the bass side and of a backward curving form unlike that of the Italian theorboes. This drawing by Watteau shows a large continuo instrument.
A Lute Player, by Antoine Watteau (1684 - 1721) Santa Barbara, Museum of Art
Click here to see a reconstruction of the large version of this type of lute.
In Italy in the 17th century the drive towards extending the bass range of the lute was accommodated somewhat more consistently by continuing the theorbo design into smaller lutes for solo use.
Lute Player, possibly by Caravaggio
This liuto attiorbato came to be used in addition to normal lutes and theorbos for accompanying singers and continuo work. Matteo Sellas was part of another large German family of instrument makers based in Italy, and produced very elaborate lutes and liuti attiorbati of ivory and ebony at his workshop ‘alla Corona’, at the sign of the crown, in Venice, for instance this fine example currently in the Musée de la Musique in Paris.
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Liuto attiorbato by Matteo Sellas, 1638, Musée de la Musique, Paris E. 1028 Photos by Jean-Marc Anglès |
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Click here to see a reconstruction of this type of lute.
His brother Giorgio made equally decorative guitars and lutes ‘alla stella’.
Working in Rome, beyond what might seem to be the natural migration range from Germany, were Martinus Harz, David Tecchler, Antonio Giauna and Cinthius Rotundus, from each of whom has survived an archlute, showing this instrument’s importance in Rome in the 17th century. All these Roman archlutes are large (the neck of the Harz has been cut down somewhat) and the surviving Roman repertoire shows them being used as continuo instruments accompanying one of a pair of choirs, the other matching position being taken by a regular theorbo. So clearly they were expected to hold their own in an orchestral setting as much as a theorbo. However the majority of archlutes made in recent years have been based on the much smaller instruments made elswhere in Italy and Germany, these have not proved able to stand up to orchestral forces. In fact they seem only suited to the smaller forces of the Corelli trio sonatas which became so popular throughout Europe. The standard Roman pitch was lower even than the modern idea of low baroque pitch A=415Hz however, and the big Roman archlutes are too big to stand being tuned to modern pitch. This makes for a dilemma when trying to use these large archlutes in a modern performance of its Roman repertoire, The reduction of the neck length in the Harz and the German style extension probably represent the best of this same dilemma appearing in the 18th century. This makes the Harz probably the best instrument to copy for modern conditions. This picture appears to be of such a large Roman archlute and it has a triple rose like the Harz instrument, it is single strung throughout
The Concert, 1615 by Leonello Spada (1576 - 1622) who worked in Rome.
Musée du Louvre
Click here to see a reconstruction of a double strung version of this type of archlute.
