Fretwork

I was at a concert, the other day, to mark the 450th anniversary of John Dowland's birth (give or take a year or so), featuring a selection of his lute songs and music for viol consort. Given the popularity of Shakespeare's scribblings among the general public, it is a pity that this music is not more widely known, being pretty much exactly contemporary with Shakespeare, and often ploughing similar emotional depths. I suppose I first came across some of it as a teenager, playing simple lute pieces on the guitar, getting to grips with the quirky re-tuning of the third string in order to reproduce the tuning of the lute. It was many years later before I got around to buying a lute, and subsequently developed a great respect for any lutenist who was able to cope with the plethora of strings and the peculiar right hand technique, while managing to stop the instrument, with its impractical polished rounded body, sliding all over the place while you try to play. After six years or so of practice, I am still fairly useless at it. But it looks pretty.

I don't know if viol players have similar difficulties. Perhaps getting hold of catgut is a challenge, unless you happen to know some accommodating cats. But it is a rare pleasure to listen to viol music, with its typically gentle, contemplative polyphony creating an atmosphere where time seems to stand still, in contrast to the more driven fugal momentum of the baroque. There is a lot to be said for music that doesn't particularly want to go anywhere.