{"id":94,"date":"2013-10-15T20:49:30","date_gmt":"2013-10-15T20:49:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/maths\/?p=94"},"modified":"2013-12-19T09:09:35","modified_gmt":"2013-12-19T09:09:35","slug":"lutes-and-ukes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/maths\/2013\/10\/15\/lutes-and-ukes\/","title":{"rendered":"Lutes and Ukes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Southampton’s Head of Early Music Liz Kenny tells us about her summer project: In my daily life I play the lute. I\u2019m interested in how groups of plucked instruments organized themselves to produce music on the stage and in shows and masques in the seventeenth century, and how we might go about it now.\u00a0 I\u2019m also a card-carrying fan of the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain, and it suddenly occurred to me that this was a road they\u2019d been down, with great musical results that also had a sense of challenge and fun.\u00a0 Curious to know their rehearsal methods and thoughts on this and that, I got in touch and the conversation started.<\/p>\n

\"12-7637\"<\/a>
Lutes and Ukes in Turner Sims
Photo: Gerry Walden<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

We hung our early-music-meets-the-blues collaboration on the coincidence of names between a sixteenth-century church musician, Shakespeare\u2019s lute player and the delta Blues legend:\u00a0 all called Robert Johnson (check out the<\/b>\u200e Lutes and Ukes Facebook page<\/a> for clips, photos and more).\u00a0 Musically they turned out to have more than we expected in common, too. We test-drove the concept in Turner Sims a few months before taking it to Spitalfields Music and the York Early Music Festival, recruiting a large group of Southampton first year students as a focus group:\u00a0 they told us frankly where to up our game (throw away the music, take more risks\u2026) before joining us in some improvisation.<\/p>\n

We got together again in early summer.\u00a0 Coffee breaks would find people in corners discussing the similarities between a renaissance guitar and a tiny uke, or musing on why theorboes (large lutes) are so long, difficult to carry and expensive, when a baritone uke does the trick at a fraction of the time and hassle\u2026and why one musician learns things from recording stuff into a phone, and another writes crib notes in lute tablature\u2026\"12-7628\"<\/a>\"12-7656\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I liked what the Guardian<\/em> said:<\/p>\n

It’s not often you witness a player attacking their instrument with a bottleneck while another strokes theirs with a quill. Yet it was more than just a gimmick, the correspondence between the two Johnsons proved to be instructive: both created sublime musical expressions of melancholy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The York Post<\/em> went for a more prophetic tone:<\/p>\n

The York Early Music Festival will never be the same again.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As I\u2019m one of their artistic advisors until 2014, I\u2019m hoping this is a good thing, but you never know\u2026<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/a>
Photo Eddie Rolmanis, NCEM<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Meanwhile one of the other things I do at Southampton is run a course for Masters students on performance teaching, so I\u2019m always mulling over how to get kids enjoying music. Having done song-based projects in Southampton, where a group of students and I would go regularly into schools (our part in the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment\u2019s Anthem for a Child Project<\/a> being the latest),\u00a0 I was wondering if there was a way to do it on instruments.\u00a0 The ukulele is a great solution: it sounds good with little experience but has a lifetime of possibilities in it, and 30 of them can be bought for relatively little money.\u00a0 All we needed was a project title and some schools:\u00a0 the ever-ready inspiration of George Hinchliffe gave us Youths Lutes and Ukes,<\/i> and 360 children from 11 schools in Lewisham and York signed up for a term of ukulele-early-blues.\u00a0 You can go a long way with C, F and G chords\u2026.many hours later, here we are (see picture\/s). Three players can tune 30 ukes in about 5 minutes, 60 in 10, and 180 is best done outside in the sunshine.<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/a>
Photo Eddie Rolmanis, NCEM<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As well as our university, the National Centre for Early Music, Music4U, the SHM Foundation and the Lewisham and East Riding Music Hubs all supported Youths, Lutes and Ukes.\u00a0 Thank you!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Southampton’s Head of Early Music Liz Kenny tells us about her summer project: In my daily life I play the lute. I\u2019m interested in how groups of plucked instruments organized themselves to produce music on the stage and in shows and masques in the seventeenth century, and how we might go about it now.\u00a0 I\u2019m also a card-carrying fan of …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":73437,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6494,207,66718,522826],"tags":[576547,577289,576814,577401,577699,577095],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","category-performance","category-staff","category-what-i-did-over-the-summer","tag-elizabeth-kenny","tag-lutes-and-ukes","tag-national-centre-for-early-music","tag-robert-johnson","tag-ukelele-orchestra-of-great-britain","tag-york-early-music-festival","column","threecol"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3YgXZ-1w","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/maths\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/maths\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/maths\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/maths\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/73437"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/maths\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/maths\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":325,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/maths\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions\/325"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/maths\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/maths\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/maths\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}