Allegory of Music by Laurent de La Hyre (1606–1656)
Large Lutes
by Hugh Cherry
What is that instrument you have been playing? This is a question I have been asked many times after concerts involving these large members of the lute family, so I thought it might be an idea to write a brief piece for the Newsletter to forestall further questions. The first thing to say is that the terminology varied around Europe, and there are many slightly different instruments of this kind. However, it is possible to divide this family of instruments into two distinct groups, and understand what the problems were that the instrument makers and players of the time were trying to solve.
The lute came into Europe from the Arab world, where the oud (as it is called) has been an important instrument for well over 1,000 years. By the late 16th century it was one of the most important European instruments as well, somewhat changed from the Arab original, but still a recognisably close relation, and renowned for its ability to express very complex music on a single instrument, albeit quietly. As the Baroque style took hold in the years before 1600 this quietness and delicacy of the lute (once one of its great qualities) became a real hindrance to its use, both for accompanying the new dramatic monodies by composers such as Caccini and Monteverdi and as an accompaniment to the growing instrumental ensembles and newly developed operas.
There is a simple way of making a plucked string instrument louder, you make the sound board and body of the instrument larger. Unfortunately, that forces you to reduce the pitch of the highest string, as, with any given material, the longer the string is, the lower the note it can be tuned to before it breaks. In practice, with a lute strung in gut, to make a large bodied lute that is still reasonably manageable you must tune it down at least a fourth from the standard pitch. This affects the whole sound world of the instrument, so all the chords you play on it become rather muddy and indistinct: you get a louder instrument, but at the price of clarity.
Around 1580, someone in Italy had the insight that if you are only asking the lute to provide harmonic support, rather than complex contrapuntal lines, you can keep the instrument at the normal pitch, but drop the highest, (and perhaps the second highest strings also) by an octave. This keeps the instrument at a pitch where it sounds clearly, while sacrificing the ability to play the highest notes. Crucially, the player does not have to relearn the instrumental tuning, just be aware that lines running onto the top two strings will suddenly drop an octave. Chord shapes are completely unchanged. This gives you a large lute that can provide strong chords at the normal pitch – difficult to play with agility because of the size, but quite manageable for a simple chordal accompaniment.
Then, in the later years of the 16th century, Alessandro Piccinini, a famous Italian player, proposed that you would get a much better bass sound if you made your bass strings very long (four or five feet). You can’t finger such strings with the left hand, but he solved this problem by providing a whole octave of strings tuned diatonically, so the player simply selected the string he needed for any particular note. As music of the time did not use remote keys this was quite practical. This gave a lute that had a clear top register, as it was still mostly at the normal pitch, and a wonderfully strong lower register, as such long bass strings are much stronger that the shorter ones on the fingerboard. This instrument was called the Theorbo (Tiorba in Italian) or Chitarrone. These two names seem interchangeable, possibly the Chitarrone was the Theorbo as played in Rome, but historical information is vague and contradictory.
The Theorbo was the perfect choice for accompanying the early baroque monodies and operas of Monteverdi and others. Strong and rich, but with a large dynamic range it provided excellent support for the voice, and the precision and power of the plucked strings provided the glue that held together the early instrumental ensembles of the baroque and added to their rhythmic life.
But music does not stand still, and as the 17th century progressed, composers wrote more and more complex bass lines using a greater pitch range and with more complex harmony. The standard Theorbo, whose highest string was typically tuned to the B just below middle C, started to have major problems with providing any harmony above much of the bass line. Also, its sheer size made the more rapidly moving lines more difficult to manage. So, some theorbos were made smaller with only the top string down an octave, and the Archlute started to dominate the continuo world. An Archlute, as its name implies, was a normally tuned lute, but with the long bass strings characteristic of the theorbo. Because all its strings were at pitch the body could not be made too large, so it was quieter than the theorbo, but in the new style the ability to play much more complex and wide-ranging lines and harmonies compensated for this. Classic pieces where the archlute excels are the Concerti Grossi of Corelli and other works around 1700, like the songs of Henry Purcell.
This is a very short summary of a very complex picture. The two important properties of these large lutes are the special tuning with the octave displacement of the upper strings, and the provision of very long bass strings that cannot be stopped with the left hand. Conventionally now, we call any lute with the specially adjusted tuning (and normally, but not necessarily, long basses) a Theorbo, and a lute with normal tuning, but the long basses, an Archlute. So Theorbos are bass instruments, with a very strong, rich sound, and archlutes are quieter and nimbler with a higher register.
Hugh Cherry
First published in the April 2017 Newsletter
