![]() ![]() In Spain there is the laùd and smaller, higher-pitched bandúrria, and in Portugal the fluid-toned guitarra. In Iberia, however, there are also lutes with bodies of pear or teardrop shape. Portugal's little four-stringed cavaquinho travelled to the Portuguese colonies of Madeira (there known as a braguinha), the Azores and Cape Verde, and onward to Hawaii to become the ukulele, and to South America to become the armadillo-backed charango. Waisted guitar-type lutes spread to Spain's South and Central American colonies, as did smaller variants that are now a range of tiples and cuatros (the latter name deriving from their four pairs of strings, as the large Cuban trés does from its three pairs and Mexico's bajo sexto from its six pairs). One of these, the viola beiroa, has a further pair of shorter higher-pitched strings that run to machine heads attached where the neck meet the body. It was the Moors who brought lutes to Iberia, where they evolved into the waisted, flat-backed, fretted Spanish guitar and Portugal's regional range of violas (also guitar-like but usually with five or six pais of steel strings). The Romanian cobza, a staple of Gypsy lautari bands until displaced by the guitar in the 1970s, is a shorter-necked, wider-bridged variant. ![]() They generally have six courses of nylon or wound-nylon strings – five double and a single – plucked with a long flexible strip plectrum. Much played in classical popular and traditional music throughout the Middle East, Turkey, Greece, the Mediterranean coastal countries of North Africa, and also in Malaysia, they have a large but light body, shaped something like a bisected pear, a medium-length neck bearing a flat, fairly wide, tapering fingerboard, the peghead bent back at an angle approaching 90 degrees.Īrabic music, like much of the traditional and classical music of non-European cultures, is not chordal so, unlike the European lutes, with their tied or fixed frets, ouds have fretless fingerboards, giving the player the freedom to slide notes and to achieve the microtones of Arabic maqam scales. Most similar to, and ancestors of, the lutes of European art music are the ud or oud family. There is a huge number and variety of lutes in use worldwide, and they have a history going back thousands of years. ![]() However, from the mid-fifteenth century it became standard to use the fingers, which meant that it could perform melody and harmony, making it the perfect instrument for accompanying song. The lute was played at first with a plectrum and occupied a more rhythmic than melodic role. Instruments with 10 courses were not uncommon, usually to give extra bass pitches. This Renaissance-style lute tuning is the most familiar to us today however, there was never a truly standardized system. By the sixteenth century, six courses had become standard, with the third in the middle. Until the fifteenth century, lutes had five courses (pairs of strings), generally tuned in fourths around a central third (e.g. He described the instrument's geometrical proportions, implying that it would be made in different sizes. The earliest design for a lute is thought to be that recorded by Henri Arnaut de Zwolle in 1440. The gut strings are usually in pairs, passing over an ornately decorated sound-hole, along the neck and into the tuning pegs, which are generally set at a right angle to the neck.įrom pictorial evidence it is clear that a standardized design of the oud existed as early as the ninth century. It is recognizable by its characteristic pear-shaped vaulted body, from which stems the neck. The western lute evolved from the Arabian oud. ![]() The lute family consists of a large group of stringed instruments in which the mechanism for holding the strings and the resonating body are joined, and in which the strings run parallel with the resonating body (i.e., guitar-like rather than harp-like). The strings of some are plucked, some are bowed. In other words, the lute is a soundbox with a neck sticking out. The word 'lute' is the collective term for a category of instruments defined as 'any chordophone having a neck that serves as string bearer, with the plane of the strings running parallel to that of the soundboard. ![]()
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