Introducing the Baroque Theorbo — Transcript

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1. 0:30At the end of the sixteenth century in Florence something strange happened in
2. 0:35the musical world which had an impact on lute players but also singers, stage
3. 0:40directors, choreographers and this was known as opera and musical theatre
4. 0:46scene so the small lute that everybody had been happily playing for centuries, on
5. 0:52which beautiful, very intimate counterpoint, polyphony, very complex
6. 0:57mathematical music could be played wasn't quite pizzazzy enough for the new
7. 1:02forms of theatrical music so the players were scurrying around with their lute
8. 1:08makers thinking about what they could do to address the challenge of playing with
9. 1:13louder singers, coming in maybe on a cloud accompanying somebody you can't
10. 1:18see, they needed a bit more beef and a bit more welly for their money. So this
11. 1:23is one of the things that resulted. Hieronymus Kapsberger was one of the
12. 1:27pioneers but the person who claimed to have invented this instrument, the chitarrone
13. 1:33or therobo as it would be called was Alessandro Piccinini and he said that
14. 1:39his great innovation was to invent a second neck. If I point up there, that's
15. 1:45the second peg box, this is the first peg box. So essentially I'm playing a lute
16. 1:50with an extra neck. Piccinini called his invention the archlute and other makers
17. 1:55at the same time were working on a different kind of prototype called a
18. 2:00chitarrone. This was meant to evoke the music of the spheres, the ancient Greek
19. 2:04kithara and was a very intellectual enterprise. However, because it looks a
20. 2:10bit daft it acquired a second name, a theorba. So you have kithara for ancient
21. 2:16Greece and theorba which was essentially a country instrument, some old geezer
22. 2:21playing a hurdy-gurdy and what I love about the instrument is that these two
23. 2:25identities, the serious one and the daft one existed and still co-exist.
24. 2:32When I catch the tube in London the capona or the blockhead identity comes out people
25. 2:38complain a lot about the space that I take up.
26. 2:42The other interesting thing about the instrument is that the top string is
27. 2:46buried in the middle. It's a little bit like a ukulele and this is because half
28. 2:57of the instrument came from a bass lute and the other half was kind of grafted
29. 3:02on. So in order to get strings that would be this long to have the big resonant
30. 3:07sound, different strings had to be used. If you used normal gut it broke so the
31. 3:14solution was just to tune these down the octave in order that you could have the
32. 3:18extra length for this octave as some of the soloists would play it.
33. 3:28But this meant you could play
34. 3:42You had a considerable range but going downwards instead of upwards and as the
35. 3:49strings are made of gut I'm going to have to tune this one...
36. 3:59These two features of the instrument are what give it its slightly eccentric character.
37. 4:06So you have the bass strings going down sometimes even arpeggiated or very sad
38. 4:26which lent itself to the kinds of improvisation that were going on in
39. 4:31opera for example the C minor chord would ring
40. 4:38on and along comes Penelope in Il returno odyssey to sing a lament about her
41. 4:46long-lost husband. So laments, vocal accompaniments were
42. 4:51what the instrument was conceived for but of course once you put a piece of
43. 4:54kit like this in a player's hand they'll do other things with it. So because of
44. 4:59the tuning I now have
45. 5:03I have a lot of strings tuned a tone apart so although we're in early music
46. 5:09territory this gives me a lot of harmonic options for example
47. 5:28So all those clashes which we wouldn't normally find in music of this
48. 5:33period are suddenly very gratifying to play under the hand and we even have
49. 5:39Turkish influence pieces such as
50. 6:06That's also a piece by Kapsberger called the
51. 6:08colascione which is a three-stringed turkish instrument so around 1600
52. 6:13there's all sorts of innovations happening. So what could you use this
53. 6:17instrument for if you're in an orchestra or in a band or in a theatre?
54. 6:23Improvisation comes very naturally you build it around chords and to do that
55. 6:30rather than have all the composers learn lute tablature they wrote just one
56. 6:34single bass note. So a single D could mean
57. 6:46or the same D could mean
58. 6:54depending on the mood of the piece. So theorbo players learnt to improvise, to
59. 6:59harmonize their own particular bass lines they might share a line with a
60. 7:03harpsichordist or a viol player or a harp and play in big groups or sometimes
61. 7:08just one voice and one lute was the kernel from which larger operas were
62. 7:14built. So Italy was the nerve center of innovation where this instrument was
63. 7:20invented but it did travel. It traveled to France where interestingly it lost
64. 7:25its chitarrone name and became the théorbe or theorbo lute and also it
65. 7:31ended up in England where it was a theorbo and theorbo came to mean just the
66. 7:36word for anything that had an extra long neck and in different people's
67. 7:41imagination the instrument took on a different character so we had all those
68. 7:45clashes and dissonances in the Italian music but the French used it for
69. 7:50a much more melodic purpose, things like this
70. 8:48and then dance music
71. 9:01and so on, so it was then used for playing in Suites so you
72. 9:06could play in one key for a while before you would have to stand up and retune to
73. 9:10change key and this is where the suite came from, you'd have a whole group of
74. 9:14pieces all in D major or C minor or B minor and this was a particular French
75. 9:20invention around these tunings on the lute. The therobo went to England as
76. 9:25well it was brought in by Inigo Jones in the 1600s but he was stopped at Dover at
77. 9:30customs as they thought the instrument was a Popish engine to destroy the King
78. 9:35so the theorbo got confiscated and not reunited with its owner until some time
79. 9:41after. Me and airport officials across the world have a similar kind of
80. 9:45relationship as I travel quite a lot with this instrument these days.