u Bu Peggu Lindquist Photos IJU Stan Sitnick cll\d Jim Blasl \ticl<I • I he fi rst t ime I heard Terrel l Stone play the l ute, our mutual friend Stacey and I had been working long and hard a l l day putting endless ads together. It was late. Terry came by to pick up Staceu and whi le he waited , he took a l ute from its case and began to play softl y . Each note seemed to drop gent ly and to spread among us, suffusing the room and our psyches with a sense of deep calm. We were no longer harried , frantic, t ired. It had the effect of a meditation. When he stopped playing , I felt a tremendous longing for that feel ing to cont inue. Although there has recently been something of a revival of interest in this instrument, the gentle tones of the lute have been infrequently heard for the last two centuries. This represents quite a decline for an instrument which was once as common as the parlor piano. The first printed music in Western Civilization was composed for the lute and published in 1 570. The lute was used as a solo instrument and also to accompany song and dance. In the next century, the lute began the transition from plebeian to elite. Comp si o b s il e it r ie s s , s o e f ei t n h g e t s h i a m t p m le os lu t te of h t a h d e b p e o e s n exhausted, began to add notes to the range of the lute, widening and lengthening the fingerboard. Other instruments became more popular the harpsichord, violin and gamba. The lute was somewhat "protected" in the environment of the aristocracy, where it served. as a court instrument. In the 1 8th Century, Germany came to prominence musically and, with the birth of Haydn, Mozart and later Beethoven the music being played changed significantly. Orchestras were established, and the violin and piano were the solo instruments of choice. In this atmosphere, the lute, as well as the harpsichord, disappeared. Only in the last 1 5 years or so have musicians and instrument makers attempted to pick up the thread. Terry is living now in Italy, playing with several early music groups and researching the wealth of music that still survives there. He returned to Portland this winter for a visit to family and friends, and after hearing hirri perform again, I decided to discover what journey had brought this 29-year-old from Prineville, Oregon, to an instrument and way of life having more in common with the 1 7th Century than the 20th. Terry is a quiet person, not necessarily easy-going, but operating on a lower level of expression than many. As I interviewed him, my tape recorder and I had to strain to hear all he said, but he did not hesitate to express · deep feelings about his involvement with the lute. Terry grew up in Prinevil le, Oregon, one of three sons of a music teacher. Together they would sing for chur? hes and family gatherings. Just for the fun of it. "I started piano lessons at age 5 like most · every American kid, but I gave it up for baseball and have never regretted that. I'm glad I had the chance to play baseball." Unlike most American kids, he played a myriad of instruments in public school bands: trumpet, cello, drums and others, depending on what was needed. Then he started a rock band with three other friends at age 1 1 , playing the electric guitar. "We had a lot of fun. We were terrible but we didn't know that and no one could tell us." That led to some serious involvement in rock bands with the usual accompaniment of drugs and life-on-the-edge, until he was 1 9 and living in Portland. The band he was in split up and he was left with a choice. "The music I liked, I still like. The lifestyle wasn't what I wanted." So he started studying classical guitar and going to school. He couldn't find a teacher, so he bought all the books he could find and studied by himself. When he did find a teacher and began taking lessons, he found himself playing a lot of lute interpretations. This resparked an interest in the instrument that had first occurred long ago. "I first heard the lute when I was 6 or 7 on a recording that my father played. I thought at the time how really magical the music was. I still remember that feeling - like a circus - just that sense of ma!jic." He found himself more and more drawn to music originally written for · the lute until, he says. it occurred to him, "Well, why don't I just play the lute." So he ordered a lute made by a local instrument maker, Robert Lundberg. That same day, he says, he was downtown and ran into a guitar-maker friend who told him he should go take a look at Trader Mike's, a hock shop. "I went by and there was a lute. I had my banjo and cello with me and I took them in and said, 'I want to trade for that lute.' 'No,' says Trader Mike, 'It costs too much.' 'No, real ly, I want it.' 'You can't do that. You're playing these two instruments, that's enough. ' He really tried to discourage me." Finally a deal was worked out: Trader Mike would take the banjo but not the cello, because Terry was then playing in the Salem Symphony and Trader Mike• seemed proud of him for that. So Terry traded the banjo and had his first lute, Christmas Eve. It was a terrible lute, as it turned out. Someone had put metal tuners in place of the wooden pegs and it nearly took two hands just to hold it. But, says Terry. "it was a lute - it wasn't a guitar." Once again, Terry had to take to books to learn the instrument. Lundberg, though not a player, helped him out as much as he could- Two years later, a couple of lutenists passed through Portland and Terry took a lesson with them. They invited him to come study with them the following year in Boston. He did and stayed for eight months. They encouraged him to apply to the Scola Cantorum Baselius in Basel, Switzerland. at that time one of two centers for the study of lute in Europe and domain of lute maestro Eugene Dombois, whom Terry idolized. Terry applied and was notified that he could come to Switzerland to audition but that there were 26 applicants for 1 2 positions. He says he thought a lot about it, weighing the distant possibility of acceptance against the expense of the trip, before deciding to go. Then, because of a plane mix-up, he arrived very late for the audition. The result was that he had no competition - the school had simply held a position open for him, just in case. So there he was, a young man from Prineville, Oregon, studying a renaissance instrument in the heart of the Old World, and wondering if he wasn't, after all, in the wrong place. "There was no doubt in my mind I could play the music and I liked the music, but I was playing next to people from Paris, Amsterdam, London. All I really knew was photographs and recordings and they were living in the center of it. It had a humbling effect on me. I was in awe of them for their geographical background. After Terry watched some of these students give up and drop out of the school and as he studied with Dombois and Hopkinson Smith, an excellent player and, as Terry describes him, "very, very American," he began to feel less historically vulnerable. He began to give a few concerts where some very good musicians would come to listen and give him criticism. That criticism helped a lot. In Oregon all he had heard was praise. Now the criticism challenged him to explore more and more possibilities. But after two and a half years, he wanted a rest from the striving and growth. He returned to Oregon, where he performed and soaked up praise for a year. He returned to Europe, Paris this time, where he had friends who were involved with 1 7th Century instruments and, particularly, making strings for them. In the last 1 O or 1 5 years, a lot of effort and much of modern technology has been put into the goal of creating a lute just like or comparable to those lutes made in the 1 6th, 1 7th and 1 8th centuries. Virtually all the knowledge of how to make a lute, normally handed down from maker to maker, was lost when lutes stopped being made for nearly two centuries. Old lutes have been examined, measured from the outside and from the inside, x-rayed, tested for the vibration of the wood, paintings studied, accounts pored over, and now there are some excellent lutes being made. But until very recently, they were strung with modern strings: plastic, nylon, nylon cores wound with an alloy, materials completely foreign to the original lute players or makers. Terry and his friends worked with gut to produce a string that could be used for the bass stnngs, something that would be dense enough to produce a good sound. Terry now makes all his own bass strings. When I arrived at the house where he was staying on this visit to Oregon, he and Stacey were conferring over a string they had just made on a machine of Terry's design. The machine twists each of three wet strands of gut separately and then twists them all together to form this thick, resonant bass string. In Paris, Terry spent all his time working on strings and playing the lute. He indulged himself in music, he says, and was very poor. Then his next opportunity presented itself. "I saw an advertisement on a bulletin board in a music store saying in strange French that this person was looking for a vihuela da mano, a Spanish instrument. I had one with me in Paris. I wrote to the address which was in Italy, saying I would like to sell mine . ��;, • , . I .....�..; - :�... ;i--i # . ... . • . • ,- ·• ...,., - . - . . ,,..:......,..---:-: - . . - ; - � .. - i-· - - - �-� .. ;: - -... .. _ .. .,. : --
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