INC 001 Jozef van Wissem
A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME
ANONYMOUS LUTE SOLOS OF THE GOLDEN AGE

(INCUNABULUM 001)

Jozef van Wissem
A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME
ANONYMOUS LUTE SOLOS OF THE GOLDEN AGE
1. Untitled
2. Maggae Hamfor
3. Untitled
4. Katherines Bairdie
5. Untitled
6. Corne Yards
7. Lamento di Tristano - Rotta
8. Whip my Toudie
9. Hench me Malie Gray
10. A Port
11. Woe betyd thy Wearie Body
12. Canaries
13. Robin is to the Greenwood Gone
14. Bransle
15. En me revenant
16. General Leslys Godnight
17. I choys to ly my Lon
18. Lady lie near Me
19. Blue Ribbon
20. Lilt Milne
21. Packingtones pound
22. Sick, Sick and Very Sick

Jozef van Wissem - Renaissance lute

Barcode: 6 89076 54824 3

Jozef Van Wissem continues to liberate the lute.
Once the most popular of portable instrument, it then entered 250 years of neglect, but today suffers from being regarded as a museum piece, only to be played in accordance with theories about authenticity.
Van Wissem has improvised with guitarists Gary Lucas and Tetuzi Akiyama, while his solo Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear alternated his own palindromic compositions with processed field recordings of airport lounges.
     The excellent A Rose By Any Other Name is a 'straight' lute record, though Van Wissem's scary monochrome cover photo harks back to a more innocent age when lute playing, like vegetarianism, would have been evidence of mild insanity.
    All 22 pieces here are anonymous- as Van Wissem points out, this could have been because the composer was too much of a celebrity to be worth naming, or else an aristocratic amateur unwilling to demean himself by appearing as a professional musician. There's one 14th century Italian drone-dance, but most are from the early 17th century, late Renaissance and pre-Baroque. Many have a forthright and folksy quality, and it's not until " En Me Revenant" ( from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge) that we hear the tricky contrapuntal lines typical of upmarket Renaissance lute. This is straight away followed by "General Leslys Godnight", which sounds like the bastard offspring of a sarabande and the blues.
Rendered still stranger by a sharp tuning (an experiment characteristic of the period, apparently). This Scottish melodie illuminates how European tunes were shortly to traverse the Atlantic and mutate in the New World.
     Van Wissem's playing is unfetterd and lacks tea-party politeness. He ranges from moody to muscular, and coaxes a good range of colors from his ten-course, Canadian-built lute, evoking African kora as well as blues guitar. My favorite, "Untitled", by Anonymous, is a stirring, spacious Scottish lament, conjuring up windswept wastes.