Latest posts
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Rob MacKillop
Life Rob MacKillop is a Scottish lutenist, guitarist, and multi-instrumentalist born in 1959 in Dundee, Scotland. Self-taught on guitar as a teenager, he later studied classical guitar at Napier College, Edinburgh, becoming a lecturer there, and subsequently spent four years at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow, graduating in 1993 and…
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Julian Bream
Life Julian Bream was born on 15 July 1933 in Battersea, London, and died on 14 August 2020 in Donhead St Andrew, Wiltshire. An English classical guitarist and lutenist, he studied piano and composition at the Royal College of Music before devoting himself to guitar and lute, largely self-taught on the latter. He made his…
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Ronn McFarlane
Life Ronn McFarlane is an American lutenist and composer, born in 1953 in West Virginia and raised in Maryland. After playing guitar in rock and blues bands as a teenager, he studied classical guitar at Shenandoah Conservatory and later trained at the Peabody Conservatory under Paul O’Dette, Roger Harmon, and Pat O’Brien. He switched his…
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Paul O’Dette
Life Paul Raymond O’Dette was born on 2 February 1954 in Pittsburgh and raised in Columbus, Ohio, where he began on electric guitar before turning to lute transcriptions and ultimately the lute itself. An American lutenist, conductor, and musicologist specializing in early music, he has made more than 120 recordings of Renaissance and Baroque repertoire…
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Michał Gondko
Life Michał Gondko is a Polish lutenist and musical director based in Basel, Switzerland. Born and raised in Warsaw, he initially studied classical guitar at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music before moving to Switzerland to concentrate on the lute, eventually graduating from the renowned Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, where he studied under Hopkinson Smith. Since…
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Nigel North
Life Nigel North was born on 5 June 1954 and is an English lutenist, musicologist, and pedagogue. Largely self-taught on the lute after studying guitar at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, he later trained at the Royal College of Music and briefly with Diana Poulton. Appointed Professor of Lute at the Guildhall at…
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Thomas Dunford
Life Thomas Dunford is a French lutenist born in 1988 in Paris, the son of American viola da gambist Jonathan Dunford and viola da gambist Sylvia Abramowicz. He discovered the lute at age nine and completed his studies at the Conservatoire de Paris in 2006, earning his bachelor’s degree in 2009. He began his professional…
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Hopkinson Smith
Life Hopkinson Smith was born on 7 December 1946 in New York City, the son of architectural writer G. E. Kidder Smith. A Swiss-American lutenist long resident in Basel, Switzerland, he graduated from Harvard University before moving to Europe in 1973 to study lute and vihuela with Emilio Pujol. In the mid-1970s he helped found…
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Jadran Duncumb
Life Jadran Duncumb is a baroque lutenist and guitarist of English and Croatian heritage, born in 1991 in Sheffield, England, who grew up near Oslo, Norway, from the age of nine. A finalist in the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition, he studied guitar under Gary Ryan and lute under Jakob Lindberg at the…
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Rolf Lislevand
Life Rolf Lislevand was born on 30 December 1961 in Oslo and is a Norwegian performer of early music specializing in lute, vihuela, Baroque guitar, and theorbo. He studied classical guitar at the Norwegian Academy of Music before entering the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel in 1984 to study with Hopkinson Smith and Eugen Dombois.…