h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Pretty good (I was looking at your list of entries, surmising that 560 could refer to that -- or is it El's points?)!

A few minor carps (well what would you expect?)

>The lute has a delicate construction - it doesn't do to bash it off walls, chairs, tables etc the way you might with guitars.

Apart from the implied slight to the guitar, this is not really accurate. The opposite is true: a lute will bounce back from knocks that would split a guitar, just as an egg will bounce when thrown on grass, and for the same reason. Seventeenth-century lutes were made lighter than earlier ones (racing models, one luthier described them as) but there are several surviving sixteenth- and seventeenth century lutes to tell the tale. (Another curiosity is that even if a good old lute does get reduced to matchwood, it can be put back together and still sound better than a modern one).

>A manufacturer of lutes was called a 'luthier'

You might add, for interest that the German is (or once was) 'Luther' even though the instrument is now called Laute in German.

>It has a round sound hole like a guitar, but unlike the guitar, the hole is filled with an elaborate piece of fretwork called a 'rose', this strengthens the body while letting the sound out.

Guitars, bandoras, and citterns also sported elaborate roses in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. It was at least as much a fashion statement as a strength-scaffold.

>The normal tuning for a six-course lute is G2 C3 F3 A3 D4 G4, higher in pitch than a guitar, but the same pattern of intervals, except that the A-string is a semitone flatter.

This kind of description is hard to write elegantly, but 'the A-string is a semitone flatter' is excessively ambiguous. Really all you need say is something like

The normal tuning for a six-course lute is G2 C3 F3 A3 D4 G4, higher in pitch than a guitar, with the same intervals in a slightly different pattern.

>Right-hand technique is slightly different from a guitar; the player strums the lowest pitched three strings downwards with the thumb and the highest pitched three strings upwards with the fingers in a 'grasping motion'.

This is grossly oversimplified, to the point of falsity. Right-hand technique is still a matter of controversy between schools of lutenists as well as guitarists, but the following is fairly well accepted:

Right-hand technique is similar to modern classical guitar, though most lutenists keep their nails short, making a firm squashy contact with the skin rather than the guitarist's nail-only stroke.

>Bach wrote a few songs for it, and included it in his St John Passion in 1722.

I don't know songs of Bach's that specify lute: there are plenty with unspecified continuo. He did write four excellent solo lute suites and other movements: a prelude-fugue-allegro in Eb, a fugue in G minor and the favourite Prelude in C minor (done in D minor on the guitar). He was close friends with the lutenist S L Weiss, who allegedly beat him once in head-to-head fugue-improvising. There is also a lute solo or two in the Matthew Passion, isn't there (haven't got a score to hand)?

>Music was written in lute tablature rather than standard musical notation.

This is a bonnet-bee of mine. Tablature *was* the standard notation for fretted instruments until c1770 (and keyboard instruments in Germany until c1700). It is actually a superior form of notation for fretted instruments, giving the same information in fewer symbols and with less ambiguity. I would prefer to read:

Music was written in tablature, not staff notation.

>Julian Bream led the revival of the lute, although he later went on to be a renowned classical guitarist.

That is news to me. Bream studied guitar first and foremost. He played the lute well, but with a guitarist's technique. Arnold Dolmetsch was more of a pioneer in researching the techniques of both making and playing lutes (among many other instruments). In fact James Joyce announced his intention of getting Dolmetsch to make him a lute in 1904 -- see p. 106 of Early Music April 1975 http://em.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/issue_pdf/frontmatter_pdf/3/2.pdf

Thanks for these comments, Andrew. It is 7 years since I wrote this Entry, so I don't now remember where I got all the information from. I'll do a bit of research and then try and incorporate all your comments in it.

I haven't got a score of the Matthew Passion, but my recording of it lists no lute; two of my music encyclopaedias mention a lute part in the John Passion, but neither mention the Matthew Passion.

The 560 was El's points, by the way. I've only written and sub-edited slightly less than 400 entries (397, I think). You can see them all at A638994.

I know there was originally a big lute solo in the Matthew originally, but it was then given to the viola da gamba: no 57, Komm süsses Kreutz. This is fiendishly difficult to play on a gamba, but Bach had an outstanding soloist (Abel) who probably said "I can do that -- gi's a job"