Guy Smith Tue, 11 Jan 2000 10:36:32 -0800 --------- OK, I wasn't going to say anything, but now I'm feeling the odd person out. My career as a lutenist started with trumpet and eventually progressed to tuba. Bear with me. While most of the modern music establishment has forgotten about anything prior to JS Bach, early music is a staple of the brass ensemble repertoire (especially Gabrieli). I fell in love with the music of the period. Having picked up a little Classical Guitar (as per Ray Nurse:-) in High School, I was excited to stumble across Die Tabulatur in the university library (UC Santa Cruz, that is, more years ago than I'll admit). That was great. Wonderful period music (Gerle and Newsidler), but I didn't need to find four other people to play it, and it was a lot easier to strap a guitar on my motorcycle than a Tuba. Eventually, I decided that the tuba was too much to keep up with, and switched to guitar full time. Eventually, all my guitar playing was devoted to lute transcriptions, so I learned to read French Tab and bought a "furniture lute" (a seven course Steiner). On the side, I acquired a PhD in Geophysics and started an academic career, which precipitated a move to the Midwest, initially Minneapolis. After 14 years in Academia (ten as a Geology/Geophysics professor at St. Louis University), I still had the Steiner, hadn't progressed very much, and got sick of academia (not necessarily in that order). I attended my first LSA seminar in 95, fell in love with the lute again, quit the university job and moved back to Seattle, in that order. Not that the LSA caused me to have my midlife crisis and leave academia or anything, but... Eventually landed a job with Microsoft as a programmer/tech writer, bought my first historically inclined instrument (one of the many 8 course Larry Brown student models), and actually started practicing regularly. Attended a couple more LSA seminars, got my right thumb sort of under control, and had a six course A-lute built (by Andrei Perkhounkov) so I could play early sixteenth century pieces, more or less in that order Now I've progressed to the dubious status of low-level manager (DirectX docs, foryou programmer types) and I'm actually acquiring a little facility with the instrument. I'm mainly focusing on early sixteenth century music. I'm fond of the Italians (especially Dalza and Capirola), but a year or so I rediscovered the early German repertoire, and have gotten hooked on Newsidler again(I'm working on several pieces from "Der Ander Theil..." and "Ein Neugeordent..."). An unjustly neglected repertoire, IMHO, and I'm planning to eventually learn German tab so I don't need to wait for the (much appreciated and no doubt poorly compensated) efforts of people like Richard Darsie and Miles Dempster to convert more German music into French tab. Guy Smith