The sound of centuries past

The past 50 years have seen an energetic revival of the instruments that would have been played in Bach's day. Henrietta Bredin meets players fascinated by the noises Baroque composers would have heard

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IF writing about music is like dancing about architecture, then, in 816, Bai Juyi, a Chinese poet, made one of the boldest imaginative leaps in his Song of the Lute (translated here by Burton Watson). It describes hearing a woman playing from a boat, the sound drifting across the water:

The big strings plang-planged like swift-falling rain,
The little strings went buzz-buzz like secret conversations,
Plang-plang, buzz-buzz mixed and mingled in her playing
Like big pearls and little pearls falling on a plate of jade.

Most musical instruments have evolved from earlier versions of themselves and alongside these are ancient-or original or historic (terms vary)-ones that hold a particular fascination for some of today's players. Of these, the lute is probably the most familiar, described by writers down the centuries and cropping up in poems by Anacreon in Greece in the 6th century BC, by Thomas Wyatt and Shakespeare in the 16th century, Emily Dickinson and Paul Laurence Dunbar in the 19th and Elizabeth Bishop in the 20th.

Lutenist Paula Chateauneuf started off by playing the guitar, but, at university in Connecticut, US, she met a music professor who happened to be mad about the viola da gamba, or viol, a family of stringed instruments played upright. The early-music revival was beginning and he'd formed a Collegium Musicum of players. 'I asked if I could join,' recalls Ms Chateauneuf. 'He stood up, went into a back room, pulled out a lute and handed it to me.