Douglas Alton Smith. A History of the Lute from Antiquity to the Renaissance.

Ft. Worth: The Lute Society of America, 2002. xvii + 389 pp. + 4 col. and 75 b/w pls. index. append, illus. $85. ISBN: 0-9714071-0-X.

This book represents a massive scholarly undertaking. Douglas Alton Smith, in the preface, explains his purpose and approach: hoping to provide a missing "panoramic view," he chose "[1] to show in words and pictures how and why the lute changed physically through the ages; [2] to give a general introduction to the lute's use in society; [3] to trace the development of its cultural symbolism; [4] to place the major lutenists and composers in perspective biographically and musically; [5] to describe succinctly the musical style of each significant figure; and [6] to suggest how the music of one may have influenced others" (xii-xiii). Smith succeeds admirably in his first intention. His selection and presentation of pictures prove especially effective in chapter 4, arguably Smith's best: "Lutes and Lute Making in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance" (58-94, plus four pages of color plates). Smith's second purpose is also well served, as he explores societal uses of the lute. His third aim, tracing the instrument's symbolism, appears as a constant throughout the book, supporting the author's central thesis that "the lute was the musical emblem of humanism.... As long as humanism held sway, the lute was the prince of instruments; when it waned, the days of the lute were numbered" (7).

Smith's fourth, fifth, and sixth aims take up the bulk of the book. For these topics, the author acknowledges the shortcoming of his reliance on secondary sources and its resulting imbalances, since some areas have received more scrutiny than others. Thus, his treatment is fullest on Italy and England; somewhat less on France, the Lowlands, and Spain; and weakest on Germany and Eastern Europe. He would have been aided had he consulted my study and translation of Sebastian Virdung's treatise, Musica getutscht, published in Basel in 1511 (Cambridge, 1993). Smith is at his most eloquent when commenting on composers and their music of which he apparently has first-hand knowledge.

Dr. Smith begins his panoramic view in Greece, where, ironically, no lute existed. Smith considers ancient Greek lyres and kitharas, because humanists during the European Renaissance misidentified the lute with these instruments, transferring the mythic and historical tales about them to Renaissance thought and practice. Smith moves to the lure's true antecedents in central Asia, notably Persia, then to its adoption by Arabs, among whom the lute held preeminence beginning shortly after the birth of Islam in 622. The lute traveled to Spain with Islam in about the ninth century. Noting that Arabic translations of Greek classic writings rendered the words "lyre" and "kithara" as "lute" (8), but not acknowledging the debt of the West to Arabic scholarship, Smith fails to recognize how Arabic scholarship contributed to conflating the lute with the ancient Greek instruments. He also ignores lateantique and medieval biblical traditions, such as translations of the Hebrew "kinnor" (lyre) as "cithara," which came to be glossed pictorially in a number of ways, including as lute or other string instrument. During the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, the lute traveled--mainly via Sicily, according to Smith--to other parts of Europe, where the instrument and its music had their great flowering in the sixteenth century. The exception was Spain, where the guitar-shaped vihuela de [sic] mano suddenly took its place. Smith's explanation is plausible: by the 1490s the lute, deemed too Moorish for Christian Spain, was expelled along with its Muslim and Jewish players, leaving its Christian practitioners to adopt an acceptable alternative (the vihuela was strung, tuned, and played like the lute).

This book has much to recommend it. Laudable, for example, is Dr. Smith's inclusion of some women's history: in ancient Greece (6), in "the Islamic era" (8-10), in medieval Spain (16-18), and in the Italian Renaissance (102-06). However, the book could have benefited from a heavier editorial hand. The minimal punctuation makes many passages difficult to fathom. More annoying is lack of coordination between illustrations and accompanying texts--especially true of the musical examples. Smith's translation policy, furthermore, is inconsistent; sometimes he gives the original language, while at other times he does not. Dr. Smith also frequently leaves a term or a person undefined at first mention, as if the book is written for those already knowledgeable about the subject. Smith often jumps to conclusions he has not given the reader cause to accept, using verb forms such as "must have been" and "surely is," for example, which would be more accurate if softened to "might have been" and "would seem to be." Also troubling to the historian in me are instances of anachronistic evidence, for example, the diagram of German lute tablature (51, fig. 16) reproduced to illustrate the system invented in the mid-fifteenth century: this diagram was published in 1727 and based on one printed in 1536. Troubling to the anthropologist in me is Smith's overriding concentration on historical development toward a later period, thus obscuring the "thing" itself (a piece of music, a style, a treatise, etc.) in favor of its place in a chronological sequence. What "lute music" actually was at a given time is likewise obscured. For, if one relies primarily on what survives in notation, the repertoire appears to consist only of what exists on paper. But music for lute was far more than that tiny tip of an enormous iceberg, the rest being built on what we cannot so readily see--oral tradition and improvisation. Indeed, much of the printed music for lute expressly pointed away from itself, being put forth as models for study and imitation. Our conclusions need to reflect how much of the repertory for lute at the time encompassed by this book was not static but ever moving--and not necessarily in the direction or according to the categories we may superimpose on it today.

The panoramic view provided by Douglas Alton Smith is nevertheless of great value, and it stands to spur another of Smith's hopes: to generate further studies that will clarify our picture.

BETH BULLARD

George Mason University