European lute

Assembled from 28 blocks · 1 evidence · 21 related

1. Story
2. The instrument that resulted when the oud was taken up by Christian Europe, and the clearest single case of organological descent in this Journey. It keeps the oud's defining features — the ribbed bowl back, the pear outline, the bent-back pegbox, gut courses plucked with the fingers — and adds two European modifications: gut frets tied around the neck, which quantise the fingerboard into fixed semitones, and a repertoire written in tablature. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's account is explicit that the medieval European lute descends from the gut-strung Arabian oud and that the name is the Arabic al-ʿūd. Iconography is the dating evidence and it is patchy: instruments of oud type appear in Iberian carving and manuscript illumination from well before the thirteenth century, but the Western lute cannot be told apart from the Arab ʿūd in pictures until roughly then, and one of the first depictions that plainly shows the European instrument is a player at a chess game in the Libro de los juegos commissioned by Alfonso X and completed about 1283. The lute went on to become the central domestic instrument of Renaissance Europe, and the fretted, waisted instruments that displaced it — vihuela, Renaissance guitar and their successors — sit on the same line.
3. Knowledge
4. Oud
5. European lute
6. Banjo
7. Connections
8. Banjo
9. Oud
10. Guitar
11. A European lute is depicted in the Libro de los juegos
12. European lute
13. The Middle Passage
14. Akonting
15. Ngoni
16. Blackface minstrelsy and the taking of the banjo
17. Hans Sloane records gourd lutes in Jamaica
18. The South Carolina Negro Act prohibits drums
19. Jefferson names the banjar and its origin
20. Blackface performers take up the banjo
21. Ngoni
22. European lute
23. The Andalusi nūba
24. Ziryāb arrives at the Umayyad court of Córdoba
25. A European lute is depicted in the Libro de los juegos
26. Granada falls and the Andalusi repertoire crosses to the Maghreb
27. Evidence
28. The medieval European lute descends from the gut-strung Arabian oud, takes its name from the Arabic al-ʿūd, cannot be distinguished from the ʿūd in Western iconography until about the thirteenth century, and appears in the Libro de los juegos commissioned by Alfonso X and completed c. 1283; European players added frets. V55 verification basis: retrieved in search summary with the substance attributed to this Met essay; the essay page itself was not opened, and no plate, accession number or footnote in it was read.