About the Web Host

I first started playing lute music (on my guitar) in 1955 after listening to Walter Gerwig's 10" LP "Music for Lute and Guitar" and playing the pieces by ear. Then I started playing Dowland lute songs on guitar. At a certain point, however, I felt I should play the music on the original instrument, so I walked into a music store in Berkeley and asked "Have you got any lutes?" As it happened, they had an 8-course one. I don't remember the maker, but it was one of those heavily constructed lutes, barely playable, and did not sound good. I then spent a year at Cambridge University, studying philosophy. During that time, I met Ian Harwood in Ely. He gave me a little pamphlet by Diana Poulton on lute technique, and I commissioned an 8-course lute from him.

Feeling a little fed up with the linguistic analysis type of philosophy they taught at Cambridge and feeling a need to be practical, I applied to medical school and eventually completed med school and continued on to complete my training as a psychiatrist at Yale and Stanford. I eventually became a kind of renegade, eschewing the medical model of helping people with life problems and ended up starting my own organization, Applied Metapsychology, International to teach these new methods. You can find out more about this aspect of my life here.

I never stopped playing the lute, first with my Harwood 8-course, then with several lutes I acquired over time. I took lessons from Stan Buetans in New Haven and workshops from Joe Iadone in Provincetown and audited early music classes at Stanford from George Houle. I did a fair amount of performing, but about 20 years ago, after the advent of lute music software, Francesco Tribioli's Fronimo in particular, I started encoding my favorite pieces, eventually establishing this website so that I could share lute pieces with other lutenists. Over the years, I have collected more and more pieces for my site.