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John Dowland was an English Renaissance composer, lutenist, and singer. He is best known today for his melancholy songs such as "Come, heavy sleep", "Come again", "Flow my tears", "I saw my Lady weepe", "Now o now I needs must part" and "In darkness let me dwell". His instrumental music has undergone a major revival, and with the 20th century's early music revival, has been a continuing source of repertoire for lutenists and classical guitarists.
A lute 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.
Alfred George Deller, CBE, was an English singer and one of the main figures in popularising the return of the countertenor voice in Renaissance and Baroque music during the 20th century.
The theorbo is a plucked string instrument of the lute family, with an extended neck and a second pegbox. Like a lute, a theorbo has a curved-back sound box with a wooden top, typically with a sound hole, and a neck extending out from the soundbox. As with the lute, the player plucks or strums the strings with one hand while "fretting" the strings with the other hand; pressing the strings in different places on the neck produces different pitches (notes), thus enabling the performer to play chords, basslines and melodies.
The cittern or cithren is a stringed instrument dating from the Renaissance. Modern scholars debate its exact history, but it is generally accepted that it is descended from the Medieval citole. Its flat-back design was simpler and cheaper to construct than the lute. It was also easier to play, smaller, less delicate and more portable. Played by people of all social classes, the cittern was a popular instrument of casual music-making much like the guitar is today.
Patrick O'Brien was an American guitarist and lutenist born in New York. He was a recording artist, but was best known as a pedagogue in the field of early plucked instruments in America, and an expert in musicians' hand anatomy. He has worked with musicians on many instruments, reworking their technique around repetitive stress injuries and breakdowns of coordination.
Basso continuo parts, almost universal in the Baroque era (1600–1750), provided the harmonic structure of the music by supplying a bassline and a chord progression. The phrase is often shortened to continuo, and the instrumentalists playing the continuo part are called the continuo group.
Dame Carolyn Emma Kirkby, is an English soprano and early music specialist. She has sung on over 100 recordings.
The archlute is a European plucked string instrument developed around 1600 as a compromise between the very large theorbo, the size and re-entrant tuning of which made for difficulties in the performance of solo music, and the Renaissance tenor lute, which lacked the bass range of the theorbo. Essentially a tenor lute with the theorbo's neck-extension, the archlute lacks the power in the tenor and the bass that the theorbo's large body and typically greater string length provide.
The gittern was a relatively small gut-strung, round-backed instrument that first appears in literature and pictorial representation during the 13th century in Western Europe. It is usually depicted played with a quill plectrum, as can be seen clearly beginning in manuscript illuminations from the thirteenth century. It was also called the guiterna in Spain, guiterne or guiterre in France, the chitarra in Italy and Quintern in Germany. A popular instrument with court musicians, minstrels, and amateurs, the gittern is considered an ancestor of the modern guitar and other instruments like the mandore, bandurria and gallichon.
Giovanni Girolamo Kapsperger was an Austrian-Italian virtuoso performer and composer of the early Baroque period. A prolific and highly original composer, Kapsberger is chiefly remembered today for his lute and theorbo (chitarrone) music, which was seminal in the development of these as solo instruments.
The mandora or gallichon is a type of 18th- and early 19th-century lute, with six to nine courses of strings. The terms were interchangeable, with mandora more commonly used from the mid-18th century onwards.
The Baroque guitar is a string instrument with five courses of gut strings and moveable gut frets. The first course sometimes used only a single string.
Paul Raymond O'Dette is an American lutenist, conductor, and musicologist specializing in early music.
Lynda Sayce is a British lutenist and theorbo player, known also as a scholar of musical history and a writer on the history of the lute and theorbo.
The Second Book of Songs is a book of songs composed by Renaissance composer John Dowland and published in London in 1600. He dedicated it to Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford.
Nigel North is an English lutenist, musicologist, and pedagogue.
Konrad Junghänel is a German lutenist and conductor in the field of historically informed performance, the founder and director of the vocal ensemble Cantus Cölln.
Christopher Wilson is a British lutenist who has performed widely and recorded several albums.
The Rauwolf Lute was made by Sixtus Rauwolf in Augsburg, German. Rauwolf was active as a lutemaker there from 1577 until ca.1625. The lute now known as the "Rauwolf Lute" is estimated to have been made in 1590. Only six surviving lutes made by Rauwolf are known, all having been altered over the years to satisfy changing musical tastes, such as a new neck installed on this one in 1715 by Leonard Mausiel, Nuremberg. The lute has "a very attractive and finely varnished maple back, and soundboard with many original bars, made by Sixtus Rauwolf".
References
- ↑ "BBC artists page".
- ↑ "Allmusic artists page".
- ↑ "Soprano Dame Emma Kirkby and Lutenist Jakob Lindberg to Give Master Class for Juilliard Historical Performance on Wednesday, October 26 at 6 PM in Juilliard's Paul Hall". juilliard.edu. 4 October 2011.
- ↑ "bach-cantatas online biography".
- ↑ "Gresham College past lectures".
- ↑ "Buckingham Palace concert programme".
- ↑ "Amazon programme notes".
- ↑ "Instrument description".
