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Elizabeth Kenny, The Caledonian lute, Early Music, Volume 40, Issue 1, February 2012, Pages 132–134, https://doi.org/10.1093/em/cas004
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In November 2001, Curtis Price reviewed Matthew Spring’s compendious history The lute in Britain (Oxford, 2000), noting that the book seemed despite itself to document the process by which, during the 17th century, the lute became ‘increasingly useless’ (Times Literary Supplement, 23 November 2001, p.13). Present-day defenders of the lute responded with a vigour which was reminiscent of the pamphlet wars (albeit with less scatological ad hominem abuse) that raged between Matthew Locke and the lute’s apologist Thomas Salmon in the 1670s. One of the points made in the modern debate was that by mid-century the lute ‘no longer had a repertory of its own’. But the wealth of important original compositions by and for lute players in the 16th century had always been complemented by an even greater number of intabulations of vocal music. In the late 17th century, lute players in Britain did virtually stop mining the seam of ‘original’ composition in favour of arrangements of tunes they found to be popular, beautiful, original or haunting, in the same way that their predecessors raided Europe’s vocal cabinet of counterpoint-rich curiosities: the difference is one of degree rather than kind. To the historian tasked with constructing critical surveys from written sources, these compositions would seem to be of lesser musical significance than originals, although there is no purely musical reason why this should be so. In France the situation was somewhat different. An influential school of players were writing lute-specific intricate music which spread across Europe, but which served no political purpose whatsoever. Kings and princes no longer mastered the instrument, leaving the lute bereft of its symbolic significance, as the great Gaultier admitted to his friend L’Enclos who had sought him out in his retirement: it was now merely a plaything for women and children. Into this debate about the significance and quality of post-Golden Age music, Matthew Spring now launches his edition of the Balcarres lute book, which he describes in the introduction as ‘the most important post-1640 British source of lute music’ (vol.i, p.xv). This is the book on which arguments concerning the lute's decline in Britain will depend. It is largely a collection of arrangements. And worse, it is likely to have been compiled by a woman to assist her step-daughter’s musical education, while her Royalist husband was in political exile in Utrecht.
