Word: lutes
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Both the beginning and ending poems of Vita Nova are themselves titled "Vita Nova," bookending a sequence of 32 inter-locking poems. It is a deeply reinforced whole--one of the last poems likens grief to the dark wood of a lute, referencing and earlier poem, "Lute Song," in which Gluck discusses the construction of the "overwhelmingly beautiful" out of "terror or pain." All of the poems address the problem of a new life, and the more obscure ones benefit from their embedment in the Vita Nova sequence...
OLAF CHRIS HENRIKSEN, LUTE...
...named Concert Room is tiny, wood paneled and elegant, divided almost in half by a low stage. Some 40 people had squashed themselves into about 60 square feet, backed against the walls or seated on folding chairs. On the stage was another folding chair, a music stand and a lute...
...crudely, a lute looks some-thing like a small, pregnant guitar. It is has a body like a pear split in half made of between nine and 50 hardwood ribs. Its short, broad neck is fretted like a guitar but ends in a long and sharply angled pegbox. It is difficult to say exactly how many strings a lute has. The strings are divided into "courses," which are either a pair of strings played together or a single string, and different kinds of lutes from different periods had different numbers of courses. This is one of the most interesting things...
...remembers that during his childhood, storytellers, or "griots," would spend afternoons with his family, reciting tales from the past as they strummed the "xalam," a traditional African lute...