Lute

Lute

Renaissance lute in 2013
String instrument
Classification	String instrument (plucked)
Hornbostel–Sachs classification	321 (Composite chordophone)
Developed	Classical antiquity (early lutes) Middle Ages (modern lutes)
Related instruments
List Angélique Archlute Barbat (lute) Chitarra Italiana Guitar Mandocello Mandola Mandolin Mandolute Oud Pipa Setar Taar Theorbo Torban
Musicians
List Barbad Xavier Díaz-Latorre Johann Georg Hamann Lutz Kirchhof Christopher Wilke Hopkinson Smith Jozef van Wissem Eduardo Eguez
Builders
List Andrew Rutherford Cezar Mateus

A lute (/ljuːt/^[1] or /luːt/) is any plucked string instrument with a neck and a deep round back enclosing a hollow cavity, usually with a sound hole or opening in the body. It may be either fretted or unfretted.

More specifically, the term "lute" commonly refers to an instrument from the family of European lutes which were themselves influenced by Indian short-necked lutes in Gandhara which became the predecessor of the Islamic, the Sino-Japanese and the European lute families.^[2] The term also refers generally to any necked string instrument having the strings running in a plane parallel to the sound table (in the Hornbostel–Sachs system).

The strings are attached to pegs or posts at the end of the neck, which have some type of turning mechanism to enable the player to tighten the tension on the string or loosen the tension before playing (which respectively raise or lower the pitch of a string), so that each string is tuned to a specific pitch (or note). The lute is plucked or strummed with one hand while the other hand "frets" (presses down) the strings on the neck's fingerboard. By pressing the strings on different places of the fingerboard, the player can shorten or lengthen the part of the string that is vibrating, thus producing higher or lower pitches (notes).

The European lute and the modern Near-Eastern oud descend from a common ancestor via diverging evolutionary paths. The lute is used in a great variety of instrumental music from the Medieval to the late Baroque eras and was the most important instrument for secular music in the Renaissance.^[3] During the Baroque music era, the lute was used as one of the instruments that played the basso continuo accompaniment parts. It is also an accompanying instrument in vocal works. The lute player either improvises ("realizes") a chordal accompaniment based on the figured bass part, or plays a written-out accompaniment (both music notation and tablature ("tab") are used for lute). As a small instrument, the lute produces a relatively quiet sound. The player of a lute is called a lutenist, lutanist or lutist, and a maker of lutes (or any similar string instrument, or violin family instruments) is referred to as a luthier.

Curt Sachs defined lute in the terminology section of The History of Musical Instruments^[4] as "composed of a body, and of a neck which serves both as a handle and as a means of stretching the strings beyond the body".^[5] His definition focused on body and neck characteristics and not on the way the strings were sounded, so the fiddle counted as a "bowed lute".^[5] Sachs also distinguished between the "long-necked lute" and the short-necked variety.^[5] The short-necked variety contained most of our modern instruments, "lutes, guitars, hurdy-gurdies and the entire family of viols and violins".^[5]

The long lutes were the more ancient lutes; the "Arabic tanbūr ... faithfully preserved the outer appearance of the ancient lutes of Babylonia and Egypt".^[6] He further categorized long lutes with a "pierced lute" and "long neck lute".^[5] The pierced lute had a neck made from a stick that pierced the body (as in the ancient Egyptian long-neck lutes, and the modern African gunbrī^[7]).^[8]

The long lute had an attached neck, and included the sitar, tanbur and tar: the dutār had two strings, setār three strings, čārtār four strings, pančtār five strings.^[5][6]

Sachs's book is from 1941, and the archaeological evidence available to him placed the early lutes at about 2000 BC.^[9] Discoveries since then have pushed the existence of the lute back to c. 3100 BC.^[10]

Musicologist Richard Dumbrill today uses the word lute more categorically to discuss instruments that existed millennia before the term "lute" was coined.^[11] Dumbrill documented more than 3,000 years of iconographic evidence of the lutes in Mesopotamia, in his book The Archaeomusicology of the Ancient Near East. According to Dumbrill, the lute family included instruments in Mesopotamia before 3000 BC.^[10] He points to a cylinder seal as evidence; dating from about 3100 BC or earlier and now in the possession of the British Museum, the seal depicts on one side what is thought to be a woman playing a stick "lute".^[10][12] Like Sachs, Dumbrill saw length as distinguishing lutes, dividing the Mesopotamian lutes into a long variety and a short.^[13] His book does not cover the shorter instruments that became the European lute, beyond showing examples of shorter lutes in the ancient world. He focuses on the longer lutes of Mesopotamia, various types of necked chordophones that developed throughout the ancient world: Indian (Gandhara and others), Greek, Egyptian (in the Middle Kingdom), Iranian (Elamite and others), Jewish/Israelite, Hittite, Roman, Bulgar, Turkic, Chinese, Armenian/Cilician cultures. He names among the long lutes, the pandura and the tanbur^[14]

The line of short-necked lutes was further developed to the east of Mesopotamia, in Bactria and Gandhara, into a short, almond-shaped lute.^[15][16] Curt Sachs talked about the depictions of Gandharan lutes in art, where they are presented in a mix of "Northwest Indian art" under "strong Greek influences".^[17] The short-necked lutes in these Gandhara artworks were "the venerable ancestor of the Islamic, the Sino-Japanese and the European lute families".^[17] He described the Gandhara lutes as having a "pear-shaped body tapering towards the short neck, a frontal stringholder, lateral pegs, and either four or five strings".^[17]

Bactria and Gandhara became part of the Sasanian Empire (224–651). Under the Sasanians, a short almond-shaped lute from Bactria came to be called the barbat or barbud, which was developed into the later Islamic world's oud or ud.^[15] When the Moors conquered Andalusia in 711, they brought their ud or quitra along, into a country that had already known a lute tradition under the Romans, the pandura.

During the 8th and 9th centuries, many musicians and artists from across the Islamic world flocked to Iberia.^[18] Among them was Abu l-Hasan 'Ali Ibn Nafi' (789–857),^[19][20] a prominent musician, who had trained under Ishaq al-Mawsili (d. 850) in Baghdad and was exiled to Andalusia before 833. He taught and has been credited with adding a fifth string to his oud^[15] and with establishing one of the first schools of music in Córdoba.^[21]

By the 11th century, Muslim Iberia had become a center for the manufacture of instruments. These goods spread gradually to Provence, influencing French troubadours and trouvères and eventually reaching the rest of Europe. While Europe developed the lute, the oud remained a central part of Arab music, and broader Ottoman music, undergoing a range of transformations.^[22]

Beside the introduction of the lute to Spain (Andalusia) by the Moors, another important point of transfer of the lute from Arabian to European culture was Sicily, where it was brought either by Byzantine or later by Muslim musicians.^[23] There were singer-lutenists at the court in Palermo after the Norman conquest of the island from the Muslims, and the lute is depicted extensively in the ceiling paintings in the Palermo's royal Cappella Palatina, dedicated by the Norman King Roger II of Sicily in 1140.^[23] His Hohenstaufen grandson Frederick II, Holy Roman Emperor (1194–1250) continued integrating Muslims into his court, including Moorish musicians.^[24] Frederick II made visits to the Lech valley and Bavaria between 1218 and 1237 with a "Moorish Sicilian retinue".^[25] By the 14th century, lutes had spread throughout Italy and, probably because of the cultural influence of the Hohenstaufen kings and emperor, based in Palermo, the lute had also made significant inroads into the German-speaking lands. By 1500, the valley and Füssen had several lute-making families, and in the next two centuries the area hosted "famous names of 16th and 17th century lutemaking".^[26]

Although the major entry of the short lute was in Western Europe, leading to a variety of lute styles, the short lute entered Europe in the East as well; as early as the sixth century, the Bulgars brought the short-necked variety of the instrument called komuz to the Balkans.

Medieval lutes were four- and five-course instruments, plucked with a quill as a plectrum. There were several sizes and, by the end of the Renaissance, seven sizes (up to the great octave bass) are documented. Song accompaniment was probably the lute's primary function in the Middle Ages, but very little music securely attributable to the lute survives from before 1500. Medieval and early-Renaissance song accompaniments were probably mostly improvised, hence the lack of written records.

In the last few decades of the fifteenth century, to play Renaissance polyphony on a single instrument, lutenists gradually abandoned the quill in favor of plucking the instrument with the fingers. The number of courses grew to six and beyond. The lute was the premier solo instrument of the sixteenth century, but continued to accompany singers as well.

About 1500, many Iberian lutenists adopted vihuela de mano, a viol-shaped instrument tuned like the lute; both instruments continued in coexistence. This instrument also found its way to parts of Italy that were under Spanish domination (especially Sicily and the papal states under the Borgia pope Alexander VI who brought many Catalan musicians to Italy), where it was known as the viola da mano.^{[citation needed]}

By the end of the Renaissance, the number of courses had grown to ten, and during the Baroque era the number continued to grow until it reached 14 (and occasionally as many as 19). These instruments, with up to 35 strings, required innovations in the structure of the lute. At the end of the lute's evolution the archlute, theorbo and torban had long extensions attached to the main tuning head to provide a greater resonating length for the bass strings, and since human fingers are not long enough to stop strings across a neck wide enough to hold 14 courses, the bass strings were placed outside the fretboard, and were played open, i.e., without pressing them against the fingerboard with the left hand. "The lute is a very fragile instrument and so, although there are many surviving old lutes, very few with their original soundboards are in playable condition,"^[27] which makes the Rauwolf Lute so notable.

Over the course of the Baroque era, the lute was increasingly relegated to the continuo accompaniment, and was eventually superseded in that role by keyboard instruments. The lute almost fell out of use after 1800. Some sorts of lute were still used for some time in Germany, Sweden, and Ukraine.

The words lute and oud possibly derive from Arabic al-ʿoud (العود - literally means "the wood"). It may refer to the wooden plectrum traditionally used for playing the oud, to the thin strips of wood used for the back, or to the wooden soundboard that distinguished it from similar instruments with skin-faced bodies.^[15]

Many theories have been proposed for the origin of the Arabic name. Music scholar Eckhard Neubauer suggested that oud may be an Arabic borrowing from the Persian word rōd or rūd, which meant string.^[28][29] Another researcher, archaeomusicologist Richard J. Dumbrill, suggests that rud came from the Sanskrit rudrī (रुद्री, meaning "string instrument") and transferred to Arabic and European languages by way of a Semitic language.^[30] However another theory, according to Semitic language scholars, is that the Arabic ʿoud is derived from Syriac ʿoud-a, meaning "wooden stick" and "burning wood"—cognate to Biblical Hebrew 'ūḏ, referring to a stick used to stir logs in a fire.^[31][32] Henry George Farmer notes the similarity between al-ʿūd and al-ʿawda ("the return" – of bliss).^[33]

Lutes are made almost entirely of wood. The soundboard is a teardrop-shaped thin flat plate of resonant wood (typically spruce). In all lutes the soundboard has a single (sometimes triple) decorated sound hole under the strings called the rose. The sound hole is not open, but rather covered with a grille in the form of an intertwining vine or a decorative knot, carved directly out of the wood of the soundboard.

The geometry of the lute soundboard is relatively complex, involving a system of barring that places braces perpendicular to the strings at specific lengths along the overall length of the belly, the ends of which are angled to abut the ribs on either side for structural reasons. Robert Lundberg, in his book Historical Lute Construction, suggests ancient builders placed bars according to whole-number ratios of the scale length and belly length. He further suggests the inward bend of the soundboard (the "belly scoop") is a deliberate adaptation by ancient builders to afford the lutenist's right hand more space between the strings and soundboard.

Soundboard thickness varies, but generally hovers between 1.5 and 2 mm (0.06–0.08 in). Some luthiers tune the belly as they build, removing mass and adapting bracing to produce desirable sonic results. The lute belly is almost never finished, but in some cases the luthier may size the top with a very thin coat of shellac or glair to help keep it clean. The belly joins directly to the rib, without a lining glued to the sides, and a cap and counter cap are glued to the inside and outside of the bottom end of the bowl to provide rigidity and increased gluing surface.

After joining the top to the sides, a half-binding is usually installed around the edge of the soundboard. The half-binding is approximately half the thickness of the soundboard and is usually made of a contrasting color wood. The rebate for the half-binding must be extremely precise to avoid compromising structural integrity.

The back or the shell is assembled from thin strips of hardwood (maple, cherry, ebony, rosewood, gran, wood and/or other tonewoods) called ribs, joined (with glue) edge to edge to form a deep rounded body for the instrument. There are braces inside on the soundboard to give it strength.^[34]

The neck is made of light wood, with a veneer of hardwood (usually ebony) to provide durability for the fretboard beneath the strings. Unlike most modern stringed instruments, the lute's fretboard is mounted flush with the top. The pegbox for lutes before the Baroque era was angled back from the neck at almost 90° (see image), presumably to help hold the low-tension strings firmly against the nut which, traditionally, is not glued in place but is held in place by string pressure only. The tuning pegs are simple pegs of hardwood, somewhat tapered, that are held in place by friction in holes drilled through the pegbox.

As with other instruments that use friction pegs, the wood for the pegs is crucial. As the wood suffers dimensional changes through age and loss of humidity, it must retain a reasonably circular cross-section to function properly—as there are no gears or other mechanical aids for tuning the instrument. Often pegs were made from suitable fruitwoods such as European pearwood, or equally dimensionally stable analogues. Matheson, c. 1720, said, "If a lute-player has lived eighty years, he has surely spent sixty years tuning."^[35]

The bridge, sometimes made of a fruitwood, is attached to the soundboard typically between a fifth and a seventh of the belly length. It does not have a separate saddle but has holes bored into it to which the strings attach directly. The bridge is made so that it tapers in height and length, with the small end holding the trebles and the higher and wider end carrying the basses. Bridges are often colored black with carbon black in a binder, often shellac and often have inscribed decoration. The scrolls or other decoration on the ends of lute bridges are integral to the bridge, and are not added afterwards as on some Renaissance guitars (cf Joachim Tielke's guitars).

The frets are made of loops of gut tied around the neck. They fray with use, and must be replaced from time to time. A few additional partial frets of wood are usually glued to the body of the instrument, to allow stopping the highest-pitched courses up to a full octave higher than the open string, though these are considered anachronistic by some (though John Dowland and Thomas Robinson describe the practice of gluing wooden frets onto the soundboard). Give