Introducing the Baroque Theorbo

At the end of the 16th century in Florence something strange happened in the musical world that impacted lutenists but also singers, stage directors, choreographers and this became known as the opera and musical theater scene, so the little lute that everyone had been happily played for centuries, in which you could play beautiful, very intimate counterpoint, polyphony and very complex mathematical music, it was not fun enough for the new forms of theater music, so the performers ran back and forth. another with his luthiers thinking about what they could do. To tackle the challenge of playing with louder singers, perhaps entering a cloud accompanying someone you can't see, they needed a little more meat and a little more feel for their money.

This is one of the things that turned out. Hieronymus Kapsberger was one of the pioneers but the one who claimed to have invented this instrument, the chitarrone or therobo as it would be called, was Alessandro Piccinini and he said that his great innovation was inventing a second neck. If I point up, that's the second headstock, this is the first headstock. Basically, I'm playing a lute with an extra neck. Piccinini called his invention the archlute and other manufacturers at the same time were working on a different type of prototype called the chitarrón. It was intended to evoke the music of the spheres, ancient Greek kithara, and was a very intellectual undertaking.

However, because it looks a bit silly, it acquired a second name, theorba. So you have kithara for ancient Greece and theorba, which was essentially a rural instrument, an old man who played a hurdy-gurdy and what I love about the instrument is that these two identities, the serious one and the silly one, existed and still coexist. . When I take the subway in London the identity of capona or fool comes out, people complain a lot about the space I occupy. The other interesting thing about the instrument is that the top string is buried in the middle. It's a bit like a ukulele and this is because half of the instrument comes from a bass lute and the other half was a kind of graft.

So to get strings that were long enough to have a great resonant sound, different strings had to be used. If you used regular gut, it would break, so the solution was to simply tune them an octave lower so that we could have the extra length for this octave, as some of the soloists would be playing it. But this meant you could play. You had considerable range but going down instead of up and since the strings are made of gut I'm going to have to tune this one... These two characteristics of the instrument are what give it its slightly eccentric touch.

So you have the bass strings going down, sometimes even arpeggiated or very sad, which lent itself to the types of improvisation that occurred in opera, for example, the C minor chord would play and Penelope arrives in Il returno odyssey to sing a lament about her long-lost husband. So the instrument was conceived for wailing and vocal accompaniment, but of course once you put a piece of equipment like this in a musician's hand, they'll do other things with it. So, because of the tuning I have now, I have a lot of strings tuned one pitch apart, so although we're in early music territory, this gives me a lot of harmonic options, for example.

So, all those clashes that we wouldn't normally find in music. From this period suddenly it is very rewarding to play with the hand and we even have Turkish influenced pieces like That is also a piece by Kapsberger called colascione, which is a Turkish three-stringed instrument, so around 1600 all kinds of innovations. So what could you use this instrument for if you are in an orchestra, a band or a theater? Improvisation comes very naturally, it's built around chords, and to do it, instead of all the composers learning lute tablature, they wrote just one bass note. So a single D could mean or the same D could mean depending on the mood of the piece.

Then the

theorbo

players learned to improvise, to harmonize their own particular bass lines; they could share a line with a harpsichordist, violator or harp player and play in large groups or sometimes just a voice and a lute was the core from which larger operas were formed. built. So Italy was the nerve center of innovation where this instrument was invented but it did travel. It traveled to France where curiously it lost its chitarrón name and became the lute théorbe or

theorbo

and also ended up in England where it was a theorbo and theorbo came to simply mean the word for anything that had an extra long neck and in different people.

In our imagination the instrument took on a different character, so we had all those clashes and dissonances in Italian music, but the French used it for a much more melodic purpose, things like this and then dance music and so on, so then was used to touch. in Suites so that you could play in one key for a while before having to get up and retune to change keys and that's where the suite came from, you would have a whole group of pieces, all in D major or C minor or B minor and this was a particular French invention around these tunings on the lute.

The theorbo also went to England. It was brought by Inigo Jones in the 17th century, but he was detained at the Dover customs because they thought the instrument was a papist instrument to destroy the king, so the theorbo was confiscated and was not reunited with its owner until some time later. . Airport officials around the world and I have a similar relationship, as I travel a lot with this instrument these days.