Lute Festival 2006 Performers
The Venere Lute Quartet

     One of the few professional lute ensembles today, the Venere Lute Quartet performs a wide range of Renaissance and Baroque masterworks and is actively expanding the surviving lute ensemble repertoire with its own arrangements. In this it follows a tradition of intabulation that has been handed down from lutenists of the early sixteenth century. The Quartet is named after the Italian Renaissance luthier Vendelio Venere, who (like Antonio Stradivari) was regarded among the finest luthiers of his age. Members of the Quartet are busy lute professionals in four of America’s leading early music centers (Boston, New York, Chicago, and Minneapolis) who share a love of performing, scholarship, teaching, and ensemble playing. Longtime friends, they began playing together while teaching at Lute Society of America Seminars. A recording entitled “Sweet Division” has been released by the LSA.

     The Venere Lute Quartet performs on an exquisitely crafted family of Renaissance lutes that are all strung in gut and are modeled after instruments from Venere’s workshop by luthiers Lawrence K. Brown and Grant Tomlinson. This set of soprano, alto, tenor, and bass lutes is sized according to Pythagorean proportions; that is, in relation to the vibrating string length of the bass lute, the tenor lute is three quarters as long and tuned a fourth higher (4:3), the alto lute is two thirds as long and tuned a fifth higher (3:2), and the soprano lute is half as long and tuned an octave higher (2:1). Instrument makers and musicians of the Renaissance were highly influenced by the theoretical and philosophical ideas attributed to Pythagoras, such as the relation of pitch to the length of a vibrating string and the belief that the “symphony” of sounding numbers in music expressed the orderly workings of the universe. Indeed, for many humanists of the Renaissance, the harmony of the universe was most clearly revealed in the well-tuned, well-played strings of the lute.


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Last updated 24 February AD 2006 – DFH