Old-Fashioned Love Songs

This evening of music, Old-Fashioned Love Songs, grew out of two impulses that developed in parallel. The first was my desire to write words and music that expressed the infinite affection, devotion and trust I feel for the love of my life: my wife, Jen. I have written poems and love songs for her before, but I could never say enough in a fourteen-line sonnet or a four-minute pop song; my ideas were too expansive, my execution too mannered. I wanted a platform that would give me space to luxuriate in the subject of love, and yet one that would nudge me to be unflinchingly open and honest.

The other idea that gnawed at me was an obsession with building a new instrument. What I had in mind was something in the harp-guitar family, combining a normal, fretted neck along with bass strings tuned in a scale, as on a harp. I found myself drawn to the theorbo, a member of the lute family that emerged in Italy in the late-1500’s. I first saw and heard this giraffe-necked instrument playing basso continuo in a production of Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, and I fell in love with its sonorous bass notes and smooth chord voicings. Many variants of the theorbo existed throughout its 150 years of active duty around Europe, but I took my pattern from that early Italian type, called the chitarrone. I designed my new instrument with seven fretted strings—tuned in the traditional “re-entrant” pattern, which drops the top two strings into a lower octave—and seven bass strings, descending from the note F (a semitone higher than the low E on a normal guitar) down to G, well below a cello’s range.

I set out to hybridize this instrument with an electric guitar, to give it a sound and function in line with my own musical language. Designing and building the world’s first electric theorbo involved more than two years of trial, error, inspiration, and sometimes dumb luck. I was grateful for the help I received from friends and family through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign, which allowed me to acquire the specialized tools, lumber and hardware I needed. (I also offer my deepest thanks to Strathmore, which offered commissioning funds and a performance date at a point when this project was barely more than a thought in my head.)

My research led me to a reinforced carbon fiber tube to support the bass strings, which exert nearly 200 pounds of combined tension over their 40-inch span. I developed a maple sheath to hold the tube within a semi-hollow body; I repurposed harp levers to allow me to raise the pitch of each bass string by a half-step; I milled a bridge out of ebony to hold an array of fourteen guitar saddles to support the strings; I mounted lightweight, gearless tuners upside-down on the body, so the instrument would be balanced and not too heavy; I incorporated claro walnut salvaged from a California walnut grove, spalted maple from Washington state, and black limba from Africa, via an Oregon lumber yard. I bought a used router off of Craigslist, borrowed a band saw and a drill press, and found a woodworker’s co-op that let me access a planer. Even the strings had to be custom made for me, given their extreme length.

As I built the electric theorbo, my plan for Old-Fashioned Love Songs came into focus. To match this new-old instrument, I enlisted a countertenor: my friend Augustine Mercante, a master of that alto-range vocal style inextricably linked with music from earlier eras. I assembled the work as an evening of music that would interweave my own original songs with arrangements of love songs spanning from the sixteenth century to the twenty-first. I came to see that Old-Fashioned Love Songs would touch on more than just this moment in my life and relationship; it became a meditation on the complex interplay of love and time.