The lute cometh...

As I've stated before in another process blog, I'm a very instrument driven musician. So it is with great pleasure that I'm "starting over" again with a new instrument - the lute. As you may know, John Dowland was a very famous lutenist and composed about 90 works for solo lute and 88 songs. The tuning of the first six strings or "courses" are very similar to the guitar except the third course is lowered a half-step. In fact, if you capo the guitar on the third fret and lower the third string a half-step you basically have the renaissance lute setup. Many guitarist choose to perform Dowland's music in such a manner but if I'm going to do really this then I feel I have to go "all in" and find a lute to learn these songs with. My dear friend David Bucher is currently restoring a ten course lute for the purpose of this project. It is a modern replica made in 1976 by Richard Gronning of Northfield, Minnesota.

The biggest challenge for me is the old renaissance lute notation. As you can see below, the vocal part is in standard notation but the lute part is represented in tablature. The top line being the first course and the bottom being the sixth. The letters of the alphabet represent the fret number that the lutenist places his or her left hand fingers on.  ("a" is the first fret, "b" the second, "r" instead of "c" is the third and so on.) The rhythms are notated above the tablature staff. It certainly takes a lot of practice to learn to read music in this way but I soon hope to be able to read this notation as comfortably as standard notation.

 - Beau Bledsoe

Here's the same score in it's original edition.