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Medieval Lute

The medieval lute originated from instruments introduced to Europe by the Moors in the 8th century. It had 4-5 pairs of strings, about half as many as later Renaissance lutes. Medieval lutes were played using a quill plectrum and performed single lines of music. Long-necked lutes were also found in medieval paintings and were associated with Arabic culture in southern Europe. The word "lute" likely derives from the Arabic word "al-ʿoud", referring to either the wooden plectrum, thin wood strips on the back, or soundboard distinguishing it from similar instruments.

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Лариса Щёголева
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109 views6 pages

Medieval Lute

The medieval lute originated from instruments introduced to Europe by the Moors in the 8th century. It had 4-5 pairs of strings, about half as many as later Renaissance lutes. Medieval lutes were played using a quill plectrum and performed single lines of music. Long-necked lutes were also found in medieval paintings and were associated with Arabic culture in southern Europe. The word "lute" likely derives from the Arabic word "al-ʿoud", referring to either the wooden plectrum, thin wood strips on the back, or soundboard distinguishing it from similar instruments.

Uploaded by

Лариса Щёголева
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© © All Rights Reserved
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Medieval lute

MADE BY: ȘCIOGOLEVA LARISA


The lute was pre-eminent in a family of plucked-string instruments which included the mandoline-like citole and the gittern (q.v.), as well as the long-necked
Saracen or Moorish guitar. The lute itself was introduced into Europe by the Moors when they invaded Spain in the 8th century, and its popularity received a
boost when the Crusades began to increase Arabic contact c. ll00. The name, in fact, probably derives from the Arabic word ud.
Curt Sachs defined the word lute in the terminology section of The History of Musical Instruments 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". 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". Sachs also distinguished between the "long-necked lute" and the short-necked variety.The short-necked variety
contained most of our modern instruments, "lutes, guitars, hurdy-gurdies and the entire family of viols and violins".
The long lutes were the more ancient lutes; the "Arabic tanbūr ... faithfully preserved the outer appearance of the ancient
lutes of Babylonia and Egypt". He further categorized long lutes with a "pierced lute" and "long neck lute". 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). The long lute had an attached neck, and included the sitar, tanbur and tar (dutār 2 strings, setār 3 strings, čārtār 4
strings, pančtār 5 strings). Sachs's book is from 1941, and the archaeological evidence available to him placed the early lutes at
about 2000 BC. Discoveries since then have pushed the existence of the lute back to c. 3100 BC.
Musicologist Richard Dumbrill today uses the word lute more categorically to discuss instruments that existed millennia
before the term "lute" was coined. 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. 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". Like Sachs, Dumbrill saw length as distinguishing lutes, dividing the Mesopotamian lutes into a long variety and a
short. 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: Greek, Egyptian (in the Middle Kingdom), Iranian (Elamite and others),
Jewish/Israelite, Hittite, Roman, Bulgar, Turkic, Indian, Chinese, Armenian/Cilician cultures. He names among the long lutes,
the pandura and the tanbur
Medieval lutes are shown with four or five courses, or pairs of strings_about half the number of later Renaissance lutes. The main
difference from the Renaissance lute, however, is that the medieval variety was played using a quill plectrum on a single line of
music. Typically, the right arm of the player comes directly around the end of the instrument (or even up from the bottom),allowing

for an easy up-and-down motion of the plectrum. Some long-necked lutes are found in medieval paintings as well. These “Moorish
guitars” seem to have been especially associated with arabic culture, although they found use in southern Europe as well.
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.
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. 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. 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.
[27][28]
Henry George Farmer notes the similarity between al-ʿūd and al-ʿawda ("the return" – of bliss).

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