Thomas Schall     Sat, 8 Jan 2000 23:38:35 +0100
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Nice question - I always wondered, who might be the persons behind
this @s ...

I am still 34 (not long, but still I am) and live in Sulzbach near
Frankfurt in Germany.
I started playing guitar at the age of 6. 
As Michaels parents my parents forced me to some "serious" education
instead of my musical interests, so I studied social sciences and
philosophy (Serious indead!) and am currently working as programmer
in Windows-surroundings, but never stoped playing guitar. About 10
years ago I wondered what the original instrument could be of what I
was playing music - in my region the historical lute wasn't well
known and most people equalized lute = Wandervogellaute which is a
guitar-like, mandora-shaped instrument popular in germany during the
first half of the century. 
I tried to obtain a lute and luckily I was brave enough to try a
historical model instead of that Wandervogellute. 
Now I would call myself a lute-maniac. One of these guys doing their
job and afterwards playing lute. 
I started playing renaissance lute but at the moment my prefered
instrument is my baroque-lute. 
I am playing solo as well as together with my duo-partner on traverso
(and a baroque-cello who is joining us this year) and also work
together with some wind-instruments and a viol to accompany a
dance-group during performances to celebrate Gutenberg's birthday (at
least the city of Mainz decided to celebrate his birthday this year
as nobody exactly knows which year was the year of Gutenberg's
birth). And I started playing baroque lute duets with a swiss firend
and hope we get a "performance state" during this year.
My favorites are late german baroque music, Vallet, Mertel and
italian music, starting interest in Czech baroque music (Losy!) and
german baroque music (Reusner) and mybe someday I'll get ready for
the frensh stuff .
I would enjoy playing medieval music but - no time!
I did some work for the german lute society (made and organized the
tab-supplements, wrote articles and reviews and such) as well but
being amateur-player (feeling in the tradition the "Dilletante della
musica") I felt I better quit such a job and leave it to the
scientists.
Did I mention that I am still playing in a guitar-trio and made some
performances (Scheidler, Giuliani, Mozart, Pujol, Piazolla) together
with modern flute? 

I have also some pupils but as this is very time consuming I try to
avoid accepting new ones.

Thomas