THE ROWALLAN MANUSCRIPT

A collection of lute pieces from the Scottish Renaissance, that demonstrates the movement away from the influence of the Royal Court, to the more folk-style dance tunes, of the native clans of Scotland. Featuring  delightful, lilting melodies and hauntingly beautiful pieces, this music conjures up images of the mist shrouded Scottish highlands and times long gone by.

The Rowallan Manuscript is also heavily influenced by the French lutenists of the day, with a number of canaries and voltes.

Played on a Dan Larsen 8 course Renaissance lute.  

 

Romanticism of the Lute (Text in Deutsch weiter unten) Film Music for the Intellectual Cinema For a long period, the lute was the best-known instrument in the west. It was loved by all levels of society and at the courts of the nobility, lute soloists were generously paid for their art. How did they achieve this special role? One credited the lute with creating its own musical world. It was a world that transcended the boundaries of everyday experience and entered unusual regions of human consciousness. One expected from a lutenist that he seduced his listeners into unknown regions of fantasy and feeling and, after a while, left these worlds only to seek even more foreign shores. German romantics had the same idea. For them, music was a world beyond our material and conscious reality and had important effect on human consciousness. In quotes from E.T.A. Hoffmann, Eichendorff and many others, one finds this spiritual relationship: Music is a higher revelation as all wisdom and philosophy. – Ludwig van Beethoven Glance of a musician in the music of the spirits. – Friedrich von Dalberg (1787 Title) It belongs to the character of the unusual, the great and of the adventurous beautified by loveliness that constitutes the essence of the romantic. – Hans Christian Koch (1807) Music has now no other role than to express the internalization of humanity and to teach mankind this unspeakable language. This is only a job of the creators but he is bound to this one duty to such a high degree that he offers himself, extinguishing himself and his personality in the work…The artist speaks not from himself: something higher, transcendental and universal speaks through him and from him; he is the megaphone of the world’s soul. (So explained Friedrich Blume in Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart Jean Paul’s and Novalis’ position on the Romanticism of Music) Music sleeps in the universe itself. It is a kind of romantic reawakening of ancient ideas from the harmony of the spheres. – Friedrich Blume, MGG). And the world rises to sing. You meet only the magical word. – Eichendorff According to E.T.A. Hoffmann had Beethoven agreed: to capture the kingdom of the gigantic and immeasurable…in this kingdom we continue to live and become ethereal observers of spirits…Mozart’s music led him into the depths of the spirit kingdom and to the realization of the endless. (according to Blume) Why do I bother with his violin when the spirit has overtaken me! – (Beethoven after a violinist had complained about the difficulty of his part). That which make me love the music so unspeakably is that it hides everything and, at the same time, says the unspeakable. – Richard Wagner. The inspiration is the soul of music as creative art – Hans Pfitzner (1919). And to compare: (Lute) music is of such transcendental nature and conveys its content so directly to the deep and insurmountable strengths of the spirit, that it moves beyond all understood languages and in much stronger dimensions as those that mesmerize humans and can bring them to divine rapture and contemplation. Such influences of music are to be compared with the blessing of a soft and heavenly being that frees both mind and soul from all troubled and disturbing movements and fills it with calm, joy, peace, absolute acceptance and indescribable satisfaction. To many, this display will seem unique but that doesn’t surprise me because I know how few reach such a high level of knowledge and experience with music. – Lutenist – Sir Thomas Mace (1676) A lutenist can accomplish everything with his instrument. He holds sway, for example, over the geometric means to square the circle, to establish the relationships of the stars to one another and to determine the velocity of falling bodies – all these he can do and a thousand more besides. – Pater Mersenne (1636). The need of the human imagination for excursions and unusual emotional experiences is served by today’s film industry and by the world of the media in general – It is my opinion, however, that these can never replace music, art and other intellectual activities.

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Rafael Arden

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