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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, 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 is 23Jan10). 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.
Note: I have switched over to the newest version of Fronimo 3.0 (build 14, rev. 93), which has some nice new bells and whistles, but which generates files that cannot be read by an earlier version of Fronimo, but the new version can read all the older versions of Fronimo, as well as midi files and TAB files.. The newest version is a free upgrade. To date, only the very newest files are in the new format. Everything, of course, is in PDF format as well.
NEW:
I have just posted an intriguing piece by , a 12-tone fugue on Morley's "Mistress Mine" for solo 8-course lute. Quite ingenious.
News: I have decided to tackle that blockbuster of a lute book, Bésard's Thesaurus Harmonicus (1603). I already have a lot of stuff posted from Books 3 and 4, but now I have just completed Book 1, which consists of preludes, many by Laurencini and Diomedes, and Book 2, consisting of Fantasias. Included is a cleaned-up version of the source for Book 1. A lot of good stuff, though there are a large number of errors (average about 3-4 per piece), some spotted by the composer in his errata sheet, most not. In most cases I think I have been able to suss out what the composer meant. Then on to the rest of Thesaurus Harmonicus, one book at a time (confronting all 351 pages at once is way too overwhelming). For now, I am leaving these pieces under "Besard" in the directory tree, though eventually I will split them out by their actual composers (only a few are actually by Besard).
Bésard, or his publisher, was not exactly modest. The first part of Book 1 consists of a sizeable collection (in Latin -- sorry; it's not my native language) of poems praising Bésard and his teacher Laurencini. A particularly silly item is a "Dialogue between a Muse and Apollo", in which the writer has Apollo giving up his cithara in shame -- plectrum, strings and all -- because he has to acknowledge that Bésard is superior to him.
Recent posting: Francis Pilkington's First Booke of Songs or Ayres (1613). This is a collection of 21 excellent songs, written in both four-part madrigal format and lute song format. I have included both, as well as versions for lute, viol (playing the bass vocal part) and voice. Pilkington, in my experience, is less often played than, say, Morley, Dowland, or Campion, yet his songs are of equally high quality. They range from the frivolous to the deeply mournful. The quality of the poetry is exquisite as well. I have also included the source facsimile, in case anyone wants to check my work. For more information, see my editorial notes.
I have also done an entabulation of "Miserere, my Maker", which Alfred Deller popularized in the 60's (it's on You Tube)
Recent posting: the complete Dalza's "Intabulatura de Lauto", Book 4 (1508), including the source facsimile, cleaned up for greater readability. I got a serious boost on this project from , who had already entabulated about half of these pieces some time ago. The pieces are mostly pretty simple, lively and interesting, if a bit crude at times, and the publication is rife with line errors, wrong notes, dissonances, etc., which I have tried to correct to the best of my ability, always noting what the original was, in case anyone who likes such things wants to play them as printed.
I have also recently posted arrangement of two clavichord suites by Antoine Lebègue for baroque lute. They are quite beautiful.
I have completed a translation of Mattaeus Waissel's lute tutorial from his 1592 lute book. I got significant help from Douglas Alton Smith's translation in LSA Journal, v. VIII (1975), though I did my own translation of Waissel, which I hope is accurate. I also rendered all Waissel's examples into French tab for the German-tab challenged (that would be almost all of us), with fingering notations in the tab, following Waissel's instructions.
On 21Sep09 I updated all of my files and made a new Excel worksheet of the files in my site, enroute to a proper database and search engine. I also updated the footnotes in my files. In the course of doing that, I seem to have mangled at least some of them. Please let me know if you discover any errors in the footnotes, such as errors in citing the source, date, the editor, arranger, entabulator, etc. Also, the changes have not yet found their way into the PDF files; only the Fronimo files. Obviously such a database inevitably slides more and more out of date.
As part of my program for the German-tab challenged (which includes almost all of us), I have completed my editions of Mattaeus Waissel's 1573 lute book and his 1592 lute book, which I understand to be one of the last to be written in German tab. My originals are in very rough shape, but in addition to the normal PDF, Fronimo, Midi, and TAB files, I have put online a cleaned-up version of the 1592 book source and an un-cleaned-up version of the 1573 source. 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.
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 am currently working on Thesaurus Harmonicus, 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, and I also posted the source. 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. I also have the sources for these. 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.
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.
If you are curious about my other identity as a psychiatrist and philosopher, you can find out more about me by clicking here.