Emanuel Adriaenssen (also recorded as Emmanuel Adriaenssen) was a Flemish lutenist, composer, and music teacher born in Antwerp around 1554. He traveled to Rome in 1574 to study music, absorbing the Italian ornamental style, before returning to Antwerp to open an influential lute school with his brother Gysbrecht. Emanuel Adriaenssen became a well-off burgher with ties to local nobility and later served as a captain of the Antwerp civic guard. He married Sybilla Crelin in 1584, and three of their sons became notable painters. He is best known for his three-edition Pratum Musicum (1584, revised 1592 and 1600), an extensive anthology of lute solos and ensemble arrangements of madrigals and dances. He died in Antwerp in early 1604.

Through his Pratum Musicum, Emanuel Adriaenssen gave lutenists across Europe access to a vast repertory of Italian madrigals, dances, and multi-lute ensemble arrangements, and its ornamented tablatures were prized enough to reach the libraries of figures such as Constantijn Huygens and Cardinal Mazarin. As founder of an Antwerp lute school whose pupils likely included Joachim van den Hove, he helped train the next generation of Low Countries lutenists, cementing Antwerp’s place alongside Leiden as a center of Netherlandish lute music around 1600.

Sources:

• http://www.hoasm.org/IVE/Adriaensen.html
• https://sites.google.com/view/another-lute-website/a/emmanuel-adriaenssen