The guitar and the lute have diverged significantly over the past four centuries. Today, the two instruments are unlikely to be played in similar fashion, though a small but growing number of lutenists are returning to the modern classical guitar. As many of my peers, I defected from the guitar to the lute after learning how to play in the Segovian tradition. By relearning how to pluck with my right-hand fingertips on lighter instruments, I reoriented the way my fingers interacted with the strings and developed a historically informed technique that has served me for decades. Coming back to the modern guitar in the last five years, I wanted to explore the way that the fingertips - without the intervention of nails - could draw out different colors and modes of expression. Emilio Pujol's essay "The Problem of Timbre on the Guitar" proved to be quite prescient: while I found that my overall speed limit and volume were both affected in obvious ways by spreading the initial contact with the string from the nail's narrow, hard surface to a softer, broader surface I began to feel more of a convergence of lute and guitar. As an intermediary point of contact, I began to play more in the manner of Fernando Sor, who also played his La Cote guitars without nails in the early nineteenth century. By using gut treble strings on the "Spanish" guitar I found myself freed from interpretive conventions formed from nails-based playing and the Post romantic framework of Segovia and his adherents. This led me to assemble a program focused on three centuries of French and Italian influences, with various cosmopolitan accents including English ballad tunes, the flamenco dreams of Manuel de Falla and Debussy, and the Brazilian nightlife evoked by Villa-Lobos. Like Kurt Vonnegut's Billy Pilgrim, you may feel "unstuck in time", as the music of the early 20th century is essentially historical, lying more than a century in the past, while Kapsperger's toccatas and Ballard's Angeliques, written centuries ago, might feel as if they were improvised just moments ago in an intimate gathering.
The instruments played include a ten-course lute in G by Andrew Rutherford (Vallet, Kapsperger, Galilei), a 14-course archlute by Klaus Jacobsen (Zamboni Romano), a La Cote replica by Lawrence K. Brown (Sor) and a modern classical guitar by Michael Menkevich (Villa-Lobos, Falla). The pitch standards for the instruments on this program was determined for the lutes from historical evidence, and experimentally for the guitars based on their tolerance for gut stringing. The 10-course lute is tuned to a=415 Hertz and the Archlute to the Roman standard of a=392 Hz, both using a flavor of 1/6th comma mean tone. The guitars are both tuned in to a slightly lower pitch than concert pitch, but not to Baroque pitch. As Luis Milan suggested in El Maestro, I've tuned the strings as far as they could go without breaking, finding a point of resonance around a=430. I have tried to arrange the pieces in a way that will do the least violence to the listener's sense of tonal space.
I am that Arion, marvel of the world. If you doubt the sweetness of my sounds, consider the breaking waves that emerge from the breast of the sea that follows my songs.
With these words, Angelique Paulet made her court debut in 1609 in a comedy ballet, catching the passionate eye of future King Henry IV, her paramour. Paulet frequented the first Parisian literary salon, the Chambre Bleu at the Hôtel of the Marquise de Rambouillet, and earned the soubriquet La Lionne Rousse. Mademoiselle Paulet sang and played the lute to high acclaim; Lutenist Robert Ballard's Favorites d'Angeliques from his 1611 Primiere Livre du la Luth are arrangements of Pierre Guedron's chanson-courante "Destin que separè". Ballard's ten ornamented versions of this lovely tune are fitted perfectly to the lute, and the first of his Angeliques, like the courtly debut of its namesake, is particularly stunning. While the initial statements of both strains are bejeweled settings of a soaring melody, their arpeggiated repeats contain moments of careful imitation. Ballard's broken textures influenced subsequent lute and harpsichord composers in France, Italy, and Germany, including Michelagnolo Galiei, younger brother of the famous Galieo Galilei and son of the great lutenist-polymath Vincenzo Galilei. M. Galilei's "Volta" was copied by hand into empty staves of the sole surviving copy of his 1620 Primo Libro d'Intavolatura di Liuto by Albertus Werl (a student?) and is also found in concordant sources attributed to the composer. Since ornamented repeats are not found in either source, I crafted my own inspired by those of Galilei and Ballard.
During a time of religious upheaval, the Huguenot lutenist/composer Nicolas Vallet departed France for the Netherlands in 1612, eventually settling in Amsterdam. Vallet's Le Secret des Muses appeared in two volumes in 1615 - 1616, and contained fantasies, dances, and song arrangements for 9 and 10-course lute. Like contemporary English lutenists, he arranged popular ballads, including the English broadside ballad tune "Fortune my Foe". Valet's "Pavanne La Spagna" is his version of another popular English tune, The Spanish Pavin, set the virginalist John Bull and lutenist Thomas Robinson among others. Vallet was also one of the great arrangers of vocal music for the fingerboard, and perhaps his most masterful intabulation is the premiere partie of Claude Le Jeune's "Quand arrestera la coustume", a four-part chanson composed upon a poem by the exiled Protestant poet Antoine de la Roche Chandieu, who published his Octonaires de la vanité et inconstance du monde in 1606. Vallet's elegant ornamentation and explicit preference for an inherently brighter, thumb-out right-hand position pointed the way forward to the d-minor Baroque lute, while his linear writing is still heavily indebted to the late Renaissance style of Albert de Rippe and Adrian Le Roy. Particularly effective is Vallet's sudden turn from polyphony and graceful ornamentation to simple chords that halt the action just before his arrangement's final, imitative climax. It is at this point where Le Jeune's chanson had also moved to simple declamation, emphasizing that only once time ceases by stilling the motions of the heavens "will one stop the world's inconstancy", a fitting sentiment for Vallet's (and our own) generation.
Published in the same year as Ballard's collection of French court music, Kapsperger's Libro Primo for the lute couldn't feel any more foreign. While composing for the same instrument, Kapsperger's sytlus phantasticus exhibits a distinctly Roman aesthetic. Phrases are often interrupted by sudden vocal outbursts of coloratura (gorgia) reminiscent of the fireworks of monodists like Sigismono d'India, Giulio and Francesca Caccini, and of course, Kapsperger himself, who wrote some of the most challenging vocal monodies of the era. He employs biting and unprepared dissonances (durezze) that contrast with his passages of shining, polyphonic rigor. His "Toccata V" in C minor is divided into three broad arguments: the opening exposition focuses on a descending melodic gambit followed by ever more creative ripostes, ending with falling parallel sixths, while the middle corpus of the work focuses myopically on roving transpositions of a reduced form of the initial subject in close imitation that navigates the dark and light contours of each new position in the gamut. The Toccata's final peroration is an effusive series of dramatic outbursts ending in an idiosyncratic cadential ornament. Kapsperger's brief "Gagliarda XI" juxtaposes each strophe's initial, guitar-like gambit with a wide-ranging passage of divisions.
Sometime later in the seventeenth century, Giovanni Zamboni Romano was born in an eternal city ringing with the timbre of the archlute. The instrument was frequently featured in sacred oratorios, sonatas and concertos by Lelio Colista, Archelangelo Corelli, Nicola Haym and Bernardo Pasquini, cantatas by George Friederich Handel, Alessandro Scarlatti and Francesco Gasparini, was and was often featured as an obbligato and continuo instrument in Papal entertainments. Marco Pesce has noted its use of high octave strings on the bass strings starting with the 4th course for a fuller style of continuo playing. While Zamboni does not appear in the list of musicians in the Vatican records, there are small moments in his works that also demonstrate the usefulness of this special tuning, showing that his understanding of the instrument was fundamentally Roman. Little is known of him beyond his sole surviving publication and his reputed talent for polyphony, his day job as a jeweler, and a third-hand account of a near-duel with another lutenist at Pavia Cathedral, where he was employed.
Zamboni's Sonate Op. 1 (1718) is almost entirely comprised of sonatas - suites in modern parlance - each consisting of four or five French ballet movements, a common form that most modern listeners know best in similar works of J.S. Bach, G. P. Telemann and their contemporaries. We catch this trend in Zamboni just at its point of coalescence into the polarized, two and three-voice framework of the international, Italian galant style heard in the Roman composer Arcangelo Corelli's sonate da camera and employed in the works of the Dresden Lutenist Sylvius Leopold Weiss, a later friend of J. S. Bach. Zamboni's collection is the last printed music for archlute written in tablature notation; lute tablature was unusual at the time in Rome, where archlute music was normally written in staff notation, whereas German and French lutenists wrote out their works for lute in tablature. (Bach's purported lute works are copied in his own hand, while Handel's only known archlute obbligato, from his Roman period, is in staff notation, not tablature). Zamboni uses the lute in a highly idiomatic and natural way. The "Preludio" of his 9th Sonata is constructed from several long-range sequential patterns that end their clauses in colorful suspensions; as documented by Giorgio Sanguinetti and Robert O. Gjerdingen, such patterns oulived the Roman musical grammar of the Corelli craze and would survive as "movimenti di bassi" in the long-lived pedagogy of Neapolitan Conservatories and the Paris Conservatoire. In Zamboni's "Allemanda", a bass-soprano dialogue is occasionally interrupted by graceful, French descending scale passages ("chutes"); its second strain contains rising sequences and shorter phrases to quicken his listener's pulse. The "Giga" begins with a rising flourish and continues with scherzo-like surprises, turning certain some of its well-worn schemata upside down and often thwarting our expectations. For instance, the first point of repose in this movement is a questioning, evaded cadence that lacks significant tonal force. Both sections conclude after extended writing over dominant pedals. The "Zarabanda" has a gentle, if patrician air that is interrupted by a quizzical, rising chromatic scale in its second strain, as if Zamboni is has dropped an off-color joke into his polite discourse. The closing "Gavotta" is a light miniature ruled, like many of Corelli's works, by a formulaic walking bass while the upper voice maintains its simplicity in long, falling scales. Zamboni's mastery of counterpoint is evidenced by his humorous juxtaposition of accepted musical cliches and humorous asides. A well-trained connoisseur would find it easier to be "in on" his musical jokes than perhaps we are at such a historical and cultural distance from his highly literate culture of musicking.
Unlike many early 19th-century guitarists who wrote works full of flashy arpeggios and scales, Fernando Sor always focused on the compositional purity of his music first and foremost, employing his impressive technique solely to prove his sure musicality. His early training was conservative in nature: in an entry of the Encyclopédia pittoresque de la musique, Sor describes his musical training at the Monastery of Montserrat: initially, he struggled but eventually mastered the seemingly antiquated Guidonian solmization system. His eventual success in chant was rewarded by intensive, daily studies in counterpoint, with rules memorized by these same syllables. The monastery choir often sang contrapuntal motets in prima pratica style in addition to their regular fare of more contemporary masses with small orchestra, polyphonic canons, and Spanish villançicos. Sor distinguished himself by his solo singing, and by the end of his studies he was proctor of the music making and even played first violin in the orchestra. At the organ, he learned fugue, imitation, and figured bass. He and his colleagues practiced their instruments in the same room at the same time, creating a “veritable chiarivari”, and somehow along the way he mastered the quietest instrument possible! Sor's account of his time at Monteserrat reveals that his teacher, Pere Viola, had been trained in the Neapolitan Conservatory tradition that turned out armies of professional musicians in the 18th - 19th centuries. In fact, Sor was familiar with the same storehouse of compositional schemata as Zamboni.
Sor spent several periods of his life in Paris, and much of his music was published in that fertile, guitar-crazed milieu where the instrument was au courant. A century later, Gertrude Stein quipped that it was only possible for Pablo Picasso to express his Spanish cubism freely in Paris. The guitar was a commonplace enough object there for Picasso and George Braque to deconstruct and distort geometrically in some of their finest canvases of the 1910’s; it was a constant presence in cafés where radical politics and dangerous art were gnashed out by young Bohemians. The most progressive and radical musicians in the City of Lights were already parting ways from the Wagnerian musical mainstream. The revolt burst into flames with Debussy, with Erik Satie and Les Sixes, and soon thereafter, Igor Stravinsky and Edgard Varèse, to name just a few. The city drew foreign musicians, artists and writers to its salons, cafés, to Serge Diaghalev’s Ballets Russes, the Moulin Rouge and the Paris Opera. Some of these musicians, like the self-taught Brazilian, Heitor Villa-Lobos, came from abroad fully formed and ready to seek their fortune, while others like Manuel de Falla came to study the craft of composition at the Paris Conservatoire or the Schola Cantorum.
Villa-Lobos began his musical life as a guitarist playing on the streets of Rio de Janeiro. The national style, chorô, was an umbrella term for a wide variety of popular music, played throughout the night for sheer pleasure. According to Thomas G. Garcia, this urban improvisational style emerged ca. 1870 out of a mélange of old and new-world musical influences and reached its first heyday in the first two decades of the 20th century, bringing out strong passions in its players and their audiences. In the 1920s, Villa-Lobos traveled to Paris frequently, and lived there on and off for many years. He befriended Maurice Ravel, Manuel de Falla, and Edgard Varese, and was friends with Darius Milhaud of Les Six, who he helped delve into Brazilian indigenous and popular music, and who introduced Villa-Lobos to the music of Igor Stravinsky. Villa-Lobos’ Twelve Etudes (1928, rev. 1948) were composed in Paris, and are based on patterns common to Rio's urban music scene. In his approach to the guitar, Villa-Lobos seems to mirror Debussy’s idiosyncratic pianism. As the latter once said of harmonic grammar, “there are no rules, pleasure is the law”; likewise, Villa-Lobos’ harmonies often reach outside of the world of European art music. Debussy elsewhere insisted that a composer “collaborates with the scenery around him and hears harmonies of which our textbooks are ignorant.” Surely there is a touch of DIY-style of urban guitar playing in his music, but beneath it all is a subtle interplay of form, harmony and motive. Villa Lobos' 9th etude begins with a rough-hewn and brutish introduction, burying the etude's melodic subject crudely in the bass voice; this is followed by a strophic choros with Caliban's harsh complaint transformed now into Ariel's limpid aria soaring above salon-age seventh and ninth chords. The 5th Etude is one of the most impressionistic pieces of Villa Lobos' collection. It revolves around a simple, motoric ostinato in alternating thirds that is constantly recontextualized by its surroundings. The subject is freely inverted in the treble and bass duos that compete throughout, most often articulating a three-or four note scale (mi-fa-sol-fa-mi-re-mi), though occasional chromatic superimpositions frequently jar against their child-like simplicity. Open strings often appear as chimes, especially in the gently tolling E of the final strain. Segovia's well-known disrespect for Villa-Lobos' music demonstrated a classist, ethnocentric view of Latin American art. I have returned to the 1928 scores of his Preludes to remove Segovia’s interpretive (and often willful) revisions and to restore the openness and spontaneity of the composer’s music
Manuel de Falla was greatly influenced by Debussy, who had given him some guidance in composition. Two years after Debussy’s death, Falla was invited to contribute a commemorative work for a specially curated edition of La Revue musicale honoring the late composer in December 1920. The several compositions in this volume were planned as a tombeaux, entitled after the stylized musical epitaphs, often suites of short works, written by lutenists and harpsichordists in the age of Couperin. Falla’s "Homenaje: Sur la Tombeau de Debussy", written in Grenada in 1920, brings the late composer’s essence to the fingerboard of an instrument for which he never composed but often evoked, and contains two “Spanish” quotations from Debussy’s oeuvre. The first, a phrase from “La Soirée dans Grènade” from Estampes (1903), is clearly stated at the end of the "Homenaje". Debussy’s original begins similarly to Falla’s, with a habanera ostinato. And, as identified in a 1992 article by my late mentor, Dr. Peter Segal, another quotation is more abstract and compositional. Its rocking half-step (f-e-f, later b-c-b) could refer to Debussy’s “La Sérenade impromptu” from Preludes, book 1 (1919), itself an imitation of flamenco guitar playing marked “quasi guitarra”. Segal thought that Falla chose the first of these quotes in admiration of Debussy’s ability to summon the sound of Granada without ever using an authentic Spanish melody. Falla’s "Homenaje" was premiered in 1922 by Emilio Pujol, playing without nails from an edition by Miguel Llobet in what must have been a particularly intimate performance.
- Mark Rimple, January, 2024
Acknowledgements
Recorded, Engineered, Mastered and Produced by Alfred Goodrich
Ardmore, PA, 2023 - 2024
Thanks to John Trout for the use of his Andrew Rutherford 10 course Lute.
Thanks to Daniel Boring for the use of his Lawrence K. Brown guitar.
Thanks to Chris Hanning, Dean of The Wells School of Music, West Chester University of PA, for a Scholarly and Musical Activities Grant and Faculty Development Grants, and to West Chester University for their support of this project in the form of a Distinguished Research Award.
Thanks to Longwood Gardens for the gracious permission to use my photograph of the underside of one of their cupolas for the cover photo.
Heitor Villa-Lobos' Preludes are licensed through Sony / Atv Tunes LLC Obo Prima Classic Publishing.
Manual De Falla's Hommeaje is licensed through G. Schirmer, Inc. Obo Hansen London Ltd.