TensorA lute has fifteen strings.
This is not entirely accurate. Lutes started (for some value of start) with less. As the clocks wound down and time danced onward (wind them up again) the luthiers added more, and then more, and then even more. There is the tall imposition of the theorbo as a solution to this, as well as the fat and happy archlute, an alternate design. In the Baroque, the lute acquired a ridiculous amount of strings, and I can only imagine that those who played them had hands the size of dinner plates when spread, with fingers long to reach the courses, strong to press the strings against the fret, tender to coax the sweet notes. You know what they said about people with hands like that.
They could play the lute.
It is difficult to keep a lute in tune. The thing itself is wood, just wood, a natural product that breathes, seasons, and flexes with changes in temperature, moisture, and mood. Unstrung, it is bent backwards. The strings provide the tension to make it true, but there are fifteen of those bloody things, and each has its own taut to sing its proper note when plucked. This can make tuning tricky, as bringing one string up to note will change the balance over the whole instrument, sending other strings awry.
(I have a piano, too. It needs a tuning. Dad lent me a book. I've not yet tried it.)
Another difficulty with the strings is that they need to be quite taut to be true, to wiggle in the proper way. With some of the courses, I've found that proper tuning brings the strings right up to the point of breaking, sometimes leading to a kind of disheartening percussion which has no place. I've found that early on with an instrument I tend to be careful, wincing slightly as I timidly wind the string up to height. Eventually I give up and just go, finding the note with an authoritative twist. Sometimes, I can bring the whole instrument into a happy balance. Sometimes, I flinch when a string is tired and has decided to give up. I buy more strings.
This particular lute can be perverse, though. The other night while I was on the couch and the flat back of the lute was resting comfortable and quiescent on a stack of books in the far corner of the room, one of the strings, perhaps bidden by ghosts, just
snapped.
"You're a manipulator," they said. "You manipulate people to get what you want. And it looks like you're being nice to them, but I know you better than you think. You're subtle; you play a deep game. That's why people don't know that you do it. But I know that you do. Everything you do, no matter what it looks like."
I have no idea how to deal with people like that.
My lute has fifteen strings. It is enough for me. It is more than enough.
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