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 on lute, archlute, theorbo, and Baroque guitar, earning five Grammy nominations. Since 1976 he has served as Professor of Lute and Director of Early Music at the Eastman School of Music, and he is Co-Artistic Director of the Boston Early Music Festival, alongside extensive research into seventeenth-century continuo practice and lute technique.

Impact

Paul O’Dette is widely regarded as one of the architects of the modern lute revival, combining exhaustive musicological research with a virtuosic, improvisatory performance style that reshaped expectations of historically informed lute playing. His complete recordings of Dowland and Francesco da Milano set benchmarks for the field, and decades of teaching at Eastman and directing the Boston Early Music Festival have trained generations of lutenists.