The
and its Spanish cousin the
are to Renaissance music what the guitar is to modern rock.
Composer and educator Gregory Schneider performs examples of vihuela music on guitar, and talks about the instrument’s unique development in order to illustrate its import in the history of New Mexico
.---
Schneider, a self-taught classical guitarist and professor at
, discusses the intersecting histories of these three instruments and gives a brief performance as part of the New Mexico History Museum’s Threads of Memory lecture series.
Though relatively unused today,
the lute used to be all the rage
.
“
Lutists were the rock stars of their day
,” Schneider tells SFR, “Musicians like
were highly sought after. They were extremely mobile and could go with the highest bidder.”
The Spanish vihuela is essentially a lute with a slightly different shape.
The
under the
believed that the lute, which was the instrument du jour throughout the rest of 16th century Europe, was overly Arabic. While the church couldn’t deny the fashionable qualities of the lute, they could change the body shape ever so slightly to appease anti-Muslim sensibilities.
After the lute was co-opted for Spanish purposes, the development of the instrument occured contemporaneously with that of
.
Early Spanish explorers brought the vihuela with them when they colonized Central America
.
According to Schneider, “
They did this because they were very portable
, certainly more portable than the keyboard instruments of the time.”
The lute maintained its prominence in western music until around 1600
, when music for the instrument simply became too complicated for many musicians to play.
Until roughly 15 years ago, little was known about vihuela music since only one example of the instrument was believed to exist. In actuality, there were numerous other extent vihuelas that were just camouflaged.
As Schneider says, “The vihuela ends up looking a lot like a
. What happened was that we actually had a lot more vihuelas than we thought, but
they had been converted to be used as guitars
.”
To understand vihuela music today, it is important to understand that
musical theory during the Renaissance was very different from what it is now
. At height of the vihuela’s popularity, in the 16th century, music was still considered modal rather than tonal.
Modal music considers the qualities of each individual part of a musical ensemble, and understands the harmonious effects as serendipitous. As a contrast, tonal music organizes the various individual tones with reference to the whole piece.
Though today’s musical theory emphasizes tonal qualities,
Schneider’s thesis is that vihuela music is still relevant
.
“It can be surprisingly modern sounding because it doesn’t conform to what we think of as modal music. There can be some rather startling dissonances,” Schneider says.
Those dissonances take center stage during this modern performance of a nearly extinct form of music.
The Age of Discovery
Lecture and Performance
2 pm
Sunday, Jan. 2
Free with museum admission
New Mexico History Museum
113 Lincoln Ave
476-5200
