Arcadian language: Music and the pastoral tradition

THE LUTE AND THE ROLE OF MUSIC IN ARCADIA

The lute has its origins in the pre-Islamic world, specifically in the Arabic peninsula where a similar instrument called ‘ud was used at least since the sixth-century. When the Iberian Peninsula was conquered by the Arabians, the instrument was introduced into Europe, but until the thirteenth-century there is no evidence of an European version of the ‘ud, the lute. This undergone diverse changes along the centuries, in particular on the number of cords which increased considerably. During the fifteenth-century, the lute was considered the ‘perfect instrument’ and was usually used as an accompaniment of vocal music.  

During the fifteenth and sixteenth century, the centre of their fabrication was settle in North Europe, with the town of Füssen in the German Bavaria as the most prominent place, although other centres such as Bologna and Padua were also important. Extravagant materials such as ivory or ivory were also used in their fabrication. Thanks to its connections with the East, Venetian instrument makers could use them to create beautiful lutes and other instruments for the most wealthy classes.

The popularity of the instrument at the beginning of the sixteenth-century in Venice was in part spurred by the Italian printer Ottaviano Petrucci (1466-1539) who printed more than fifty collections of scores between 1501 and 1509, including few from the most famous French composer of the Renaissance, Josquin des Prez (1450/55-1521).

In the sixteenth-century, the poetry and the music were merged in a new genre, the polyphonic madrigal, which was worked by the poet Pietro Bembo (1470-1547).

During the Renaissance, the dexterity with musical instruments and singing was one of the most notorious pursuits for any learned man. Being music one the liberal arts, the knowledge of harmonic scales was seen as an element of distinction and also crucial for the understanding of nature and, ultimately, of God. Vasari tells us that many artists knew to play musical instruments, included Giorgione who was outstanding both playing the lute and singing. Since almost all the artists were not born in a wealthy family, they learned music not in a school but in their master’s workshop from the very master like Leonardo da Vinci in Andrea del Verrochio’s workshop or other apprentices.

The lute was a rather modern instrument and the shepherds or inhabitants of Arcadia are not depicted with them but with a flute, also a very popular -and cheaper- instrument. Pan, the mythological satyr who lived in Arcadia was described by Ovid as a flute player. Theocritus and Virgil transferred the play of this instrument to common shepherds of those utopian lands. Because of his simplicity of design and pleasant sound it was perfect for that peaceful world in which music was crucially essential for its existence. Indeed, through music and poetry, the shepherds usually sing about loss, either of the beloved or the land or property. The Arcadian inhabitants consider these mediums as a social exercise or necessity through which they can alleviate their sufferings on love, fortune or labour.

Bibliography

Gerbino, Giuseppe, Music and the myth of Arcadia in Renaissance Italy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2009.

Bernstein, Jane A., Print culture and music in Sixteenth-century Venice, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001.

Essay on the lute by Jonathan Santa Maria Bouquet on the Metropolitan Museum of Art website. Click here.