Duets for Lutes and Guitars by Howard and Jeremy Bass
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Liner Notes
The story of this father-son collaboration begins in the mid-1980s, when Jeremy, then a small boy, would ask to hold his dad’s lute, which he would gently strum. Decades later, as Jeremy makes his own mark as a musician and Howard’s long career draws to a close, this album’s repertoire—from lute duets of the 16th century to contemporary guitar duets by David del Puerto and Leo Brouwer—displays Jeremy and Howard’s diverse musical interests and passions.
From the brilliance of one of the first master lutenists, Francesco Canova da Milano, and the lively back-and-forth of Elizabethan-era lute duets, to music composed and arranged for two guitars (including the first recording of David del Puerto’s “Diciembre,” dedicated to Jeremy and Howard), here is music we love to play. We hope you’ll love listening! -HB
In his nearly six-decade career as a musician, Howard Bass has performed and recorded with Trio Sefardi, La Rondinella, the Baltimore Consort, HESPERUS, Flory Jagoda, Barbara Hollinshead, and the Smithsonian Chamber Players, among others. He was a program producer at the Smithsonian Institution for three decades, where he also produced several recordings for the Smithsonian Folkways label. https://triosefardi.com/
Jeremy Bass holds three postgraduate performance degrees (MM, Classical Guitar, Columbus State University; DMA, Classical Guitar, University of Kentucky; MM, Lute/Theorbo, Koninklijk Conservatorium Den Haag), and was the recipient of a Fulbright scholarship (Universidad Complutense de Madrid). He is a member of Suspirium and Sibila ensembles and plays regularly with Cantate Karavaan and many others. He served two years in the Peace Corps, in Ecuador, following his graduation from Virginia Commonwealth University. https://www.jeremyandrewbass.com/
The Lute Music
Lutes were played in pairs already by the end of the 15th century, with one player–the so-called tenorista–playing the tune, and the other playing a virtuosic upper part. Although the earliest of this music has been lost or was maybe never written down in the first place, Francesco da Milano’s La Spagna appears to come from this tradition. Francesco was called “il divino” by his contemporaries, and the influence of his many fantasies and ricercars is evident in their appearance across Europe in numerous manuscripts and publications, and in the style of lute music well into the 17th century.
One devotee of il divino was the Flemish musician Johannes Matelart, who published several of Francesco’s fantasias with an additional part added by Matelart himself. These duets, with their intricate counterpoint, show how the lute duet was developing towards greater equality between the two parts.
Pierre Phalese, another Flemish musician in whose publications works by Francesco appear, printed several intabulations of songs and dances of Italian origin for lutes at different pitches. We recorded some of these on a vihuela in A and a lute (or what Juan Bermudo called in his 1555 treatise the “vihuela of Flanders”) in G. I play a short solo fantasia by Luis de Narváez from the same publication, Theatrum Musicum. In 2023, I had the good fortune of examining and playing from an original edition of the Theatrum housed at the Nederlands Muziek Instituut in The Hague. The research presented by Jan W.J. Burgers in his monumental work The Lute Music Published by Pierre Phalese was invaluable in identifying the composers and source material for this portion of the album.
Howard Bass and I are hardly the first father-and-son lute duo. At the Elizabethan court, two famous lute players, John Dowland and John Johnson each had a lute-playing son named Robert, and also composed lute duets. Coincidence? I think not. We include several of these beautiful pieces on our album, as well as Robert Johnson’s only known solo fantasy, a late example of the genre that Francesco da Milano perfected several generations prior.
Some of the lute duets we recorded are for instruments tuned a step apart. As with many instrument families during the Renaissance era, lute sizing generally followed the consort principle*. That is to say, there were bass, tenor, alto, and soprano (or descant) lutes. Sometimes all four lutes played together, but duos and trios were more common. After all, the tuning gets rather complicated with so many strings!
The tenor lute–neither too big nor too small–is the usual instrument for solo playing. The alto lute is pitched a step higher. Its smaller size makes it apt for playing fast runs in the higher register, with the tenor lute holding down the bass line, and the two instruments blending in the mid-range.
Several years ago, I bought a beautiful 6-course alto lute from Alexander Hopkins, in part to be able to play with my dad. The limitations of air travel being what they are, we decided to borrow instruments that I had played before from friends. Alto lutes are in short supply in the DC area, but Michael Stover happens to own an alto vihuela made by the renowned Basel-based Spanish luthier Lourdes Uncilla. Uncilla belongs to a pioneering generation of luthiers in Spain who lent their sound to the recordings of Jordi Savall, José Miguel Moreno, and many others. Working in close collaboration with professional musicians, Uncilla developed a reputation for exceptionally playable instruments that are lightly-built and capable of a wide range of dynamics and colors.
Purists may note the unorthodox combination of the round-backed, pear-shaped lute and the vihuela, with its flat back and guitaresque figure-8 shape. However, the setup of these two instruments (in terms of double strings, tied frets, and sizing) was identical throughout the 16th century, and their co-existence is well-documented. Two books of Francesco da Milano’s lute music are intended for “viola overo lauto” (in reference to the Italian variant of flat-backed lute, the viola da mano). Lutenists traveled to Spain from other parts of Europe and Spanish vihuelistas (or at least Luis de Narváez) traveled throughout Europe. The books of the vihuelistas include numerous intabulations of the most popular Franco-Flemish pieces, and music by the vihuelistas (including a fantasia by Narváez included on Then & Now) also appears in foreign publications. Miguel de Cervantes humorously compares the lute and the vihuela in a passage in which Don Quixote asks for a lute to serenade a lady, and is handed a vihuela instead. -JB
*This was a response to the predominant form of music composition at the time: vocal polyphony, in which voices of different pitch (often in something approximating the familiar SATB format) sang in counterpoint to one another.
The Guitar Music
The Segovia Effect
Andrés Segovia, born in Jaén, Spain, in 1893, was the greatest guitarist of the 20th century. Through his concerts, recordings, master classes, and transcriptions Segovia brought the classical guitar out of the parlors of the 18th and 19th centuries and onto the concert stage the world over; his influence cannot be overstated. Segovia’s first public performance was in 1909 in Grenada, Spain, the start of a career that lasted for much of the twentieth century.
Segovia broadened the repertoire for the guitar through transcriptions of music originally composed for piano and the lute, and he worked with several composers, including Manuel M. Ponce, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, John Duarte, and Alexander Tansman, to expand significantly the repertoire for classical guitar. His master classes in Siena, Italy, and Santiago de Compostela, Spain, created a cadre of talented guitarists, many of whom also became teachers (including John Marlow and José Tomás, with whom Howard studied). As far as we know, Segovia composed just a bare handful of pieces for guitar, including the duet heard on our recording.
Before Segovia, the guitar was not thought of as an instrument for the concert hall, and while many guitarists composed studies and exercises, there was no real pedagogical methodology. Because of Segovia, there are now guitar programs in music conservatories, colleges, and universities all over the world, and one can attend concerts in major venues around the globe. In addition, many musicians who started with classical guitar took up the lute, and Segovia’s influence in the popularity of early music must be acknowledged as well.
Segovia once said, “When I began, the guitar was enclosed in a vicious circle. There were no composers writing for the guitar because there were no virtuoso guitarists.” And: “Lean your body forward slightly to support the guitar against your chest, for the poetry of the music should resound in your heart.” Guitarists (and many lutenists) owe a debt beyond measure and heartfelt thanks to Andrés Segovia. Music lovers everywhere are the beneficiaries of his legacy. -HB
Ferdinand Rebay (1880-1953), the arranger of the piano pieces by Max Reger on this album, has been recently rediscovered by the guitar world, and is now acknowledged as one of the most prolific composers of the twentieth century for the instrument. Andrés Segovia did much to emphasize the Spanish heritage of the classical guitar, and his influence tended to eclipse the presence of other traditions. Rebay’s native Vienna, however, had been one of the centers (along with Paris) of a golden age of the guitar in the early nineteenth century. The virtuoso guitarist-composer Mauro Giuliani premiered his first guitar concerto there in 1808, while Franz Schubert played guitar, and had some of his lieder published in versions with guitar accompaniment. That early spark of popularity led to the establishment of an important tradition guitar playing that carried through to the first half of the twentieth century, when Rebay’s niece, Gerta Hammerschmied entered the guitar studio of Jacob Ortner at the Wiener Musikakademie. Rebay was a professor of composition there, and soon began to compose and arrange for his niece and other guitarists in Ortner’s circle. He did so enthusiastically, producing many ambitious works for the instrument, with a special emphasis on chamber music. In his original compositions, he favored a late- Romantic style owing much to the models of Schubert (He was the president of the Wiener Schubertbundes for several years), Schumann, Brahms, and Bruckner. That proclivity naturally carried over into his arranging, so it is no surprise that he would choose to arrange a selection of movements from Max Reger’s Aus der Jugendzeit. Reger, after all, was a near-contemporary of Rebay’s, and this suite was clearly influenced by Robert Schumann’s famous Kinderszenen.
Leo Brouwer’s Música incidental campesina and arrangements of Beatles songs form an important part of the guitar portion of Then & Now. For devotees of the classical guitar, Brouwer–one of Cuba’s most famous musicians–needs no introduction. Distinguished composer, conductor, and guitarist, Brouwer’s professional career began in the 1950s when he was still a teenager. Today’s classical guitar world would be unimaginable without his contribution, which spans from studies for beginners to concertos for guitar and orchestra, and from arrangements of folk and popular music to experimental avant-garde compositions.
However, we chose to include Brouwer’s music on our album not because of his stature, but because we love it. Brouwer really knows how to make the guitar sing, and among the many virtues of his music is that it often sounds harder than it is. When I was starting to play classical guitar as a teenager, one of the first pieces of music I received from my dad was Brouwer’s El Decamerón Negro, a favorite of his that he first heard Berta Rojas play. This piece eventually became a cornerstone of my early concert repertoire. Brouwer’s guitar music has been a constant companion for me over the years, whether I’m teaching one of his studies, performing one of his concert pieces, or simply playing for my own enjoyment.
Then & Now features the world premiere recording of Diciembre, written for us by the great Spanish composer David del Puerto. My association with David goes back over ten years. I heard some of his guitar music on Eugenio Tobalina’s album Mirada, and decided I wanted to play something by him. He had already composed quite a lot for the guitar, and I was having trouble deciding what to play. So I wrote David an email asking for advice: maybe I should play the two preludes or the six studies? (These seemed like a good place to start.) To my surprise and delight, he responded right away, saying that if I wanted to play the studies (Seis estudios), it would be their first performance as a complete set. Around that time, I was going to begin my doctorate at the University of Kentucky, and I decided that the 6 Estudios would be a perfect addition to my first doctoral recital. That was the beginning of a long and fruitful collaboration with David that would include numerous other premieres (often together with wonderful chamber music partners), a thesis on the guitar sonatas, a recording of the 1st volume of said sonatas (with a 2nd in the works), a Fulbright grant, and of course a recording of Diciembre. -JB