The Lebanese troupe A’elet al Oud (Lute Family) has recently performed a feature at al Medinah theater in Beirut entitled Ansam al Oud: Ufoq Jadid (Lute Breezes: New Horizon). The feature included music pieces for prominent music composers including Ziad al Rahbani, Filmon Wahbi, Mohammed Abdel Wahhab and Sayyed Darwish, according to the daily al Hayat.
The new in this concert was the meeting between the sharp sound lute and the stentorian one, the fact that opens new horizons for music composition using lutes of different kinds together. Before the feature was performed by A’elet al Oud Troupe we used to hear only one lute being played along with other music instruments or accompanied with a human voice.
Serious attempts to develop methods of playing the lute continued including playing it with one hand as initiated by Nasir Shammah from Iraq and the use of five fingers like the flamenco before that. The contribution of the Lebanese singer Marcel Khalifa by playing the lute in styles not used before has expanded the sound scope of the instrument.
At the end of 2000, the Lebanese lute maker Rabee’ Haddad collaborated with Ghassan Zarzour in developing an instrument similar to Buzoq (type of lute) with an acute sound scope.
The stentorian lute has also been developed into a smaller instrument. Once the lute family has been completed, Zarzour called his colleagues at the National Music Institute, Saad Saib and Nicola Nakhleh to test these modernized instruments. The tests confirmed the expansion of the sound scope of these instruments combined together without any change in the original sound of the lute -- Albawaba.com
