Music: Young Man With a Lute

A rare, melodious twang was heard this week on U.S. airwaves. The twangs came from an instrument which legend says was invented by a son of Methuselah—the lute, an instrument resembling an archaic mandolin. Rare too was the young lutanist who plunk-a-plunked and sang ballads on an NBC Sunday sustainer. Richard Dyer-Bennet, 28-year-old minstrel, is probably the only U.S. radio entertainer listed in Burke’s Peerage.

Richard Dyer-Bennet got into Burke’s by being related to a British baronet, Sir John Dyer. He got into lute-playing less simply. Although born in England, he had a U.S. mother, chose to become a U.S. citizen on his 21st birthday, went to the University of California. There he met a voice teacher who remodeled his youthful tenor and told him of a great Swedish minstrel named Sven Scholander. When Dyer-Bennet inherited $500, he hotfooted to Sweden, learned the Swedish lute and some balladeering tricks. He was just in time: within a year, Scholander and his lute-maker were both dead.

The lute (called al’ud in Arabic) originated in the Near East, where Turks, Arabs, Armenians, Greeks still play it. It was suggested to the legendary son of Methuselah by the sight of the skeleton leg of his own dead son, whose body he had suspended (it was the custom) from a tree. The lute’s body represented the thighbone, its long neck, the leg bone; its bent head, the foot; its tuning pegs, the toes; its strings, the dried veins fluttering from the bones. The lute was the great instrument of the Middle Ages and Renaissance until the viols drowned it out. In shape, its only popular successor is the lowly mandolin; but in sound the guitar comes closer.