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Sarge Gerbode's Lute Page
Here you will find more than 3000 lute pieces in French tablature in the following formats: Fronimo (ft2 and ft3), from , TAB from , midi, and PDF (which you can read using Acrobat Reader). (Why the different formats?). I apologize to those who prefer other formats, such as Spanish or Italian, but I believe French is the most widely-used format, and anyway, it’s easiest for me! For those who have Fronimo, though, it is easy to change to another format – even German tab (not that anyone would really want to do this…)!
I have collected these pieces over the years
from the internet or have entabulated and/or arranged or realized them myself.
I have edited all of them and formatted them to fit nicely on
This material is now mirrored at lute.omerkatzir.com, thanks
to the good offices of
and
on www.lute.ru/gerbode, thanks to
, who has also translated the site
into Russian at www.lute.ru/gerbode/ru. I will try to keep these sites as
updated as possible, but gerbode.net
is likely to be the latest and greatest.
If anyone wants to contribute stuff to my site, I now have an ftp
directory dedicated to lute.
Details here. I also keep a compressed tar
file (very large) of the entire composer list in this location, with the date in the filename, for those who might want
to download it (latest was 16Jun09). I feel more secure
with these data in several different places.
I have some idiosyncratic notational conventions. I hope they are helpful rather than confusing.
NEW:
As part of my program for the German-tab challenged (which includes almost all of us), I have completed an edition of Mattaeus Waissel's 1592 lute book, which I understand to be one of the last to be written in German tab. My original is in very rough shape, so I feel daunted at the prospect of cleaning it up and putting it online, though I may do so in the future. I also finally completed my work on Hans Newsidler 1536 lute books, v.1 and v.2, as well as his later book dated 1540. Luckily, I found the first two of these already entabulated by , who also tracked down the vocal scores for most of the vocal entabulations and lined them up with the lute versions -- surely a massive project. I was able to check his entabulations against the originals and found remarkably few errors. I also cleaned up the facsimile editions for all three volumes and have posted these as well so you can check the entabulations against the source if you so desire. The source for Book 1 includes a quite detailed lute tutor (if you speak 16th century German) with exercises and easy pieces.
I did a little arrangement of the passacaglia from Handel's 7th harpsichord suite, HWV 432, for 8-course lute.
I have also posted my lute realizations for Purcell's opera King Arthur. I did not post the other parts -- just the realizations. You will probably need to play with repeats and other roadmap issues to fit your version of the opera, but this will give you a start. I recently posted the sources for van den Hove's "Florida ... (1601)", and Vallet's "Le secret des muses", Volume 1 (1615) and Volume 2 (1616) and his "Psalms of David" (1620). The Vallet pieces are for 10-course lute, but they are fairly easy and could be adapted to a lesser-course instrument. I hope to have the Fronimo files done for these fairly soon, but I have an orchestra and an opera gig coming up soon, so it may be a while. However, these sources are in French tab, and they should be pretty readable, after I did some considerable work on them to make them so (here's what I did).
Not long ago, I completed work on my edition of Piccinini's "Intavolatura di Liuto e di Chitarrone", Libro Primo. The first part of the book contains 62 pieces for 13 course archlute, and the second part has 32 pieces for 14 course chitarrone, but often these pieces can be played on a lute or theorbo with fewer courses. After the chitarrone pieces, there is a lute duet and a lute trio, both for archlutes. These are on my site under "Lute ensemble". Both solo and ensemble pieces are very high quality, very advanced pieces, some whimsical, others dark. In my opinion, these are amongst the very best in the solo repertoire. They vary in difficulty from fairly easy to quite difficult, but averaging out at a moderate level of difficulty.
Over Christmas, I added two more Bach pieces for violin and continuo (archlute) to my website (BWV 1021 and BWV 1023).
I found the source and contributor for Froberger Suite 18, nicely arranged for baroque lute by Matthias Rösel. thanks, Mathias!
I've been getting into the French repertoire lately. Adrian Le Roy's two lute books, "Fantaisies, Motets, Chansons et Danse s (1551) and "Fantaisies et danses" (1568), and 5 volumes of Albert de Rippe's Tablature de Leut. The missing volumes will follow as they become available and time permits. Albert de Rippe's volumes have what appear to be a fairly large number of mistakes in them. I have attempted to correct these in each case, noting what was in the original each time. Many of these "mistakes" involve a level of discord that I am not comfortable with; your own comfort level may vary.
Fairly recent item: A complete edition of Luys Milan's El Maestro, including the vocal pieces -- 81 pieces in all. I had significant help in this from Jason Kortis, who entabulated most of the lute solos, and Karl Eggert, who translated Luys Milan's performance notes for the pieces and carefully included all Milan's errata. I have English translations for most of the song texts, for which I claim the credit or blame.
HELP!
I have recently posted on my site Suite 18 of J.J. Froberger, for baroque
lute. This has been sitting on my
computer for some time, and I know neither the source nor the entabulator of
the piece, but it is beautiful, so I thought I would share it with you. If anyone can fill in the missing
information, please let me know!
To Err is Human; to Correct, Divine
Although I have tried to be as accurate as possible, I'm sure many errors remain. I have cited the original source (MS or otherwise) whenever I knew it, and the original contributor/entabulator, though over the years much of this data has been lost. If you feel you are the one that originally contributed a particular piece and have not been acknowledged in a footnote for having done so, or if you know the source of a particular piece for which a source is not cited or wrongly cited, please email so I can update the footnote. Also, if you find errors in any of the pieces, can you please email me and, if possible, attach the modified version? Click here for correction acknowledgments.
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I hope you get and give a great deal of pleasure from playing these pieces!
Sarge Gerbode
You can email me at:
with any comments,
corrections, or special requests.