The origin and symbolic dimension of the Renaissance lute with particular consideration of Arab and European cultural contexts Cover Image

Geneza i symboliczny wymiar lutni renesansowej ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem kontekstów kultury arabskiej i europejskiej
The origin and symbolic dimension of the Renaissance lute with particular consideration of Arab and European cultural contexts

Author(s): Grzegorz Dąbrowski
Subject(s): Music, Comparative history, History of Art
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Wrocławskiego
Keywords: lute in Asian and European culture; Renaissance lute; Arab lute (ūd); musical culture of the European Renaissance; Arab and European music theory; evenly tempered tuning; Pythagorean thought on musical intervals; European polyphony;

Summary/Abstract: Signaling the moment when music was recognized as an art form in Europe, the short-necked lute already has an unbroken history. Its contents include what is associated with an Arabic instrument called the ūd. This type of lute, as it turns out, played a very important role in the Arab world in the context of solving theoretical problems, the clarification of which at the same time had a significant impact on the performance dimensions of music. It was also no different in Europe a few centuries later. Here, too, the lute, especially during the Renaissance, played an important role in the context of solving the problem of how to temper sounds evenly in the first place. Thus, in both cases, the lute served as a kind of tool for measuring and determining the distance between sounds. Despite achieving similar goals, the types of lutes listed here definitely reflect fundamentally separate musical systems. Nevertheless, these two different forms of instruments have much in common. One might even be tempted to say that they interdepend not so much on a common, probably still Persian legacy, but on cultural content that is undoubtedly common to both Arab and European thought. And this is what this article is about, which treats, using the example of an instrument such as the lute, that culture in the largo sense depends on many influences. In the context of the case in question, it is even possible to speak not only about the relationship between Arab and European cultures, since the circle of influence, at least from the perspective of the implementation of the idea of the lute in culture, is much wider, reaching as far as India or the so-called Far East.

  • Issue Year: 28/2024
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 9-31
  • Page Count: 23
  • Language: Polish
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