Chances are that you don’t know anyone who plays the lute. And so it follows that you probably don’t know anyone selling lutes either. However, you might be surprised to know that the guitar player living next door may very well know how to play a lute despite the fact that he never broke it out at the neighborhood cookout. You may also be surprised to know that there are indeed people out there selling lutes and that like almost anything else, particularly classical musical instruments, there are always enough people interested in them to keep an active market alive in the sales and purchase of these otherwise rare instruments.
The Lute
Generally a lute can refer to almost any stringed instrument with a fretted neck and rounded wooden body. The lute has a long and storied history and dates back way beyond Medieval times, when the lute was at the height of its popularity. During the Renaissance Era the lute was used to play most of the secular music of the time. Lutes are made almost entirely from wood with the soundboard having a teardrop-shaped design and made from a thin flat plate of wood that resonates well, usually spruce. The soundboard usually has one, though sometimes more than one sound hole under the strings which is known as the rose. And rather than being an open sound hole like classical guitars or modern acoustic guitars, the sound hole on a lute is covered by a grill of intertwining vines or decorative knots carved directly out of the wood of the sound board.
Lutes For Sale Online
Considering that we are speaking about a relatively obscure instrument, there are quite a lot of lutes for sale if you look online. One of the better websites with a good selection of these instruments is activemusician.com. Here are some of the lutes that you’ll find among their inventory of instruments:
Descant, 7-Course Lacewood Lute – available for $464.25 – This Descant lute is a beautiful short necked lute that has a bowl back of lacewood staves. There are eight tied nylon grets on a lacewood neck that features a rosewood fret board. The peg box is lacewood with tuners made of rosewood. The soundboard is made of European spruce with a rosewood bridge and rosewood end pin. It has 13 nylon strings in 7 courses with a scale length of 19.75″.
6 string Lacewood Lute-Guitar – available for $524.25 – The lute-guitar is an attractive and lightweight instrument of a similar size and scale to a standard classical guitar but with a body like a lute. In keeping with the character of a lute, the bowl-shaped body is achieved by edge-gluing together staves of uniformly thin lacewood bent to a specific shape with no heavy internal bracing to retain its form. Lacewood is a light-colored hardwood that has color similar to maple and has distinctive rays that provide what is known as a “beeswing” pattern. The mahogany neck as a shape similar to a classical guitar with a 51mm wide nut fashioned from ebony. The length is 40″ and the scale length is 25 3/8″, similar to a normal guitar.
Another very good source for buying Renaissance Era lutes is YourWorldInsturments.com . You’ll find a good selection of instruments on their website as well as a couple of videos with their resident musicians demonstrating how to play the lute. Here are several examples of the lutes they are listing for sale.
EMS 7-Course Lute – available for $613.00 – Designed by early Music Shop in Bradford England this lute features a rosewood body, neck and fretboard, ebony pegs, dark and light staves, 7 courses, fixed and movable frets and a rosette carved into a light spruce soundboard. This particular instrument also includes a case and instruction book.
Flat Back Lute – available for $257.00 – This exceptionally beautiful flat back lute was designed and handcrafted in England. This is a 15 string, 8 course lute with a rosewood body, ebony tuning pegs and movable frets that are tied onto the instrument. The solid spruce soundboard is decorated with an attractive center rosette. It also comes with a traveling black nylon case and the Learning to Play the Lute book by DeGroodt. It measures 23 1/2 inches from nut to bridge. The peg box is 9 1/2 inches long and at its widest point it measures 10 inches across.
The Lute Over Time
No one can really pinpoint when the lute first made an appearance in history and frankly, historians have never really agreed on what was and what was not a lute anyway. One of the earliest known glimpses of a lute is from the 4th century B.C. in ancient Greek Mantineia marble with its depiction of the contest between Apollo and Marsyas. The lute continued to appear throughout history with various types of chordophones seen in ancient Greece, Egypt, Rome, Turkey, India, China, and the Bulgar culture. The lute as it is more commonly known today took its form and shape in the 6th century and featured bodies often covered with animal skins.
The lute is indeed an instrument that has stood the test of time while spanning as many eras and centuries as almost any instrument known to man other than the rudimentary drum or other percussion instruments. In modern times you are most likely to see a lute being played at a Renaissance Fair or at a Medieval Times fairgrounds where they reenact scenes from this time in history.
