Tablatures for Plucked Chordophones: Another Cultural History

Abstract

The centrality of the lute during the sixteenth century is well known and the dominance began to occur as early as the last decades of the previous century. From the Arab ‘ud it underwent a gradual transformation during the Middle Ages until it adopted what we could call definitive in the 16th century. During the Renaissance, the lute served multiple functions. It is not only revealed as a solo instrument and as a companion instrument or it stands out for the originality and diffusion of its repertoire, but it is also used as a didactic tool, as an instrument in which composers test their works and in which experiments are carried out with the temperament. On the other hand, it generated an active commercial movement led by music printers, booksellers and luthiers, in addition to creating the demand for teachers and professional lute players. We have considered using cultural history as a suitable framework for the study of the lute movement and, advancing in this idea, we believe that it is possible to deduce
multiple cultural histories given the various functions performed by the instrument
and the environment it generated.One of those histories is the one we will expose in
this work: a cultural history of lute-specific notation, that is, the tablatures.