He names among the long lutes, the pandura and the tanbur He focuses on the longer lutes of Mesopotamia, various types of necked chordophones that developed throughout the ancient world: Greek, Egyptian (in the Middle Kingdom), Iranian ( Elamite and others), Jewish/Israelite, Hittite, Roman, Bulgar, Turkic, Indian, Chinese, Armenian/ Cilician cultures. His book does not cover the shorter instruments that became the European lute, beyond showing examples of shorter lutes in the ancient world. Like Sachs, Dumbrill saw length as distinguishing lutes, dividing the Mesopotamian lutes into a long variety and a short. He points to a cylinder seal as evidence dating from about 3100 BC or earlier and now in the possession of the British Museum, the seal depicts on one side what is thought to be a woman playing a stick 'lute'. According to Dumbrill, the lute family included instruments in Mesopotamia before 3000 BC. Dumbrill documented more than 3,000 years of iconographic evidence of the lutes in Mesopotamia, in his book The Archaeomusicology of the Ancient Near East. Musicologist Richard Dumbrill today uses the word lute more categorically to discuss instruments that existed millennia before the term 'lute' was coined. Discoveries since then have pushed the existence of the lute back to c. Sachs's book is from 1941, and the archaeological evidence available to him placed the early lutes at about 2000 BC. The long lute had an attached neck, and included the sitar, tanbur and tar: the dutār had 2 strings, setār 3 strings, čārtār 4 strings, pančtār 5 strings. The pierced lute had a neck made from a stick that pierced the body (as in the ancient Egyptian long-neck lutes, and the modern African gunbrī ). He further categorized long lutes with a 'pierced lute' and 'long neck lute'. faithfully preserved the outer appearance of the ancient lutes of Babylonia and Egypt'. The long lutes were the more ancient lutes the ' Arabic tanbūr . The short-necked variety contained most of our modern instruments, 'lutes, guitars, hurdy-gurdies and the entire family of viols and violins'. Sachs also distinguished between the 'long-necked lute' and the short-necked variety. His definition focused on body and neck characteristics and not on the way the strings were sounded, so the fiddle counted as a 'bowed lute'. Gandhara Lute, Pakistan, Swat Valley, Gandhara region, 4th-5th centuryĬurt Sachs defined lute in the terminology section of The History of Musical Instruments as 'composed of a body, and of a neck which serves both as a handle and as a means of stretching the strings beyond the body'. History and evolution of the lute First lutes The player of a lute is called a lutenist, lutanist or lutist, and a maker of lutes (or any similar string instrument, or violin family instruments) is referred to as a luthier. As a small instrument, the lute produces a relatively quiet sound.

The lute player either improvises ('realizes') a chordal accompaniment based on the figured bass part, or plays a written-out accompaniment (both music notation and tablature ('tab') are used for lute). It is also an accompanying instrument in vocal works. During the Baroque music era, the lute was used as one of the instruments which played the basso continuo accompaniment parts. The lute is used in a great variety of instrumental music from the Medieval to the late Baroque eras and was the most important instrument for secular music in the Renaissance. The European lute and the modern Near-Eastern oud descend from a common ancestor via diverging evolutionary paths. By pressing the strings on different places of the fingerboard, the player can shorten or lengthen the part of the string that is vibrating, thus producing higher or lower pitches (notes). The lute is plucked or strummed with one hand while the other hand 'frets' (presses down) the strings on the neck's fingerboard. The strings are attached to pegs or posts at the end of the neck, which have some type of turning mechanism to enable the player to tighten the tension on the string or loosen the tension before playing (which respectively raise or lower the pitch of a string), so that each string is tuned to a specific pitch (or note). The term also refers generally to any string instrument having the strings running in a plane parallel to the sound table (in the Hornbostel–Sachs system). More specifically, the term 'lute' can refer to an instrument from the family of European lutes. 2 in C minor - I PreludeĪ lute ( / lj uː t/ or / l uː t/) is any plucked string instrument with a neck and a deep round back enclosing a hollow cavity, usually with a sound hole or opening in the body.

Instruments like a lute