![]() ![]() The picture resolution is not great, but you get the idea: two soundhole rosettes (both of simple design), bridge with scratch plate out front, tilework inlays, binding all around the top, and curving neck joint (rather than a blunt joint, as one finds on a renaissance lute). The larger image first:Īnd then the detail. ![]() It appears in a fresco among a group of musical instruments (including a gittern) by Lippo Vanni, in the Church of San Lorenzo al Lago. I found another example of this type of lute (not, incidentally, in H.M. The soundhole rosettes are simple (in comparison to those that we see in renaissance lutes), but they're elegant, and their simplicity is more than balanced by the busyness of the rest of the design, including the soundboard edging (which looked to me like a kind of 'herringbone' binding), and the tilework inlay in the soundboard. The scratch plate in front of the bridge was another 'ud-like detail. The bridge had a nice shape, and looked a lot like the kind of bridge you might find on a modern 'ud. That in itself is a convincing detail.īut much else in the picture looked appropriate too. Outline conformed quite nicely to some simple geometry, using whole-number So the proportions seemed right, and indeed, when I put together a drawing using a compass and straightedge, the body It also had a ratio of neck length to body length that would allow for the equivalent of around 5 or 6 frets on the fingerboard, and 8 to the upper soundhole rosette (another of Gus's requests). First, it seemed to be of a size (in relation to the angel holding it) that could work for a lute with a string length of around 60cm, with the top course tuned in g', which was Gus's request. Why did I choose this particular picture as my model? Well, there are a number of details that led me to believe it might offer a viable design. Here it is, a Coronation of the Virgin by Andrea Di Bartolo, from the Ca d'Oro in Venice.Īnd here's a close up of the lute. I located the journal at the University of British Columbia library, spent a day up to my elbows in pictures, and emerged with one good depiction of the kind of lute that I thought would work. ![]() What a resource! I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in the subject: a near-exhaustive collection of pictures, indexed by artist and type of instrument depicted, all keyed to a list of thumbnail versions of the pictures. He also narrowed the search further, by suggesting I consult Howard Mayer Brown's "Catalogus, A Corpus of Trecento Pictures with Musical Subject Matter," a series of articles published in the journal Imago Musicae in the mid-1980s. Actually, it was two pieces of advice: build the instrument lightly, he said (more on this later) and for a model, look at Sienese pictures from the 14th century. One piece of advice that proved invaluable came from Crawford Young, the early lute scholar and performer. Hans Ott giettern (photo courtesy of Wikimedia commons)īut which iconographic evidence? Depictions of lutes abound from the middle ages-in altarpieces, manuscript illuminations, frescoes, wood carvings and so on, in a seemingly unending stream. For anything earlier than that-say, one or two hundred years earlier, which is approximately the period Gus and I had in mind-we really need to rely on iconographic evidence. Probably the earliest surviving European plucked string instrument, the gittern by Hans Ott of Nuremburg, dates to about the mid-15th century, and that's about as far back as we can get. The main problem in designing and building an instrument like this is that no historical examples of such an early lute have survived. My hope was that by judiciously combining certain features of both these instruments, I could perhaps find a way back to that common ancestor. The modern 'ud, and what we now call the renaissance lute, are both descended from this early 'ud, and are therefore very close cousins. The lute's a natural for this, since its direct ancestor, the 'ud, was brought to Europe by the Moors about a thousand years ago. Of how he wanted to use the lute, which was to explore, with his musicalĬollaborators, the connections between European and eastern/Arabic music of the Gus didn’t have a specific design in mind, but he did have a firm idea Number of courses (5, instead of the usual 4), tuning (in fourths), and so on. Gus and I focused on the basics: the size (and pitch) of the instrument, ![]()
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