Welcome to Lute Stuff!

Before there was Lutestuff.com, there was Instru­men­ta Anti­qua. IA was cre­at­ed in 1964, long before per­son­al com­put­ers. Its mis­sion was (and still is) to reveal to the world the extra­or­di­nary music that was pop­u­lar in Europe 400 years ago. Who (in 1964) could have fore­seen the elec­tron­ic rev­o­lu­tion to come and the Inter­net? It seems astound­ing that lute music is still flour­ish­ing on the web in 2024! This says much about the qual­i­ty of the art they prac­ticed long ago and the endur­ing beauty and power of the lute.

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Stan­ley Buetens’ books and teach­ings intro­duced many decades of clas­si­cal musi­cians to a great quan­ti­ty of rarely pub­lished music. I could never match his knowl­edge of the lute, but he did inspire my love of pub­lish­ing and design, so I will con­tin­ue to sell his books. I released his final col­lec­tion of unre­leased music as dig­i­tal down­load, Lute Ensem­ble: Stan­ley Buetens Record­ings 1964 – 1995 (or find on iTunes or your other favorite stream­ing sites) which he was work­ing on until his illness.

Stan Buetens co-found­ed the Lute Soci­ety of Amer­i­ca with Ken LaBarre, his stu­dent and col­lab­o­ra­tor on sev­er­al lute works offered here. Stan was invit­ed to teach the lute at Stan­ford Uni­ver­si­ty in 1966 and became pres­i­dent of the LSA in 1967.

Instru­men­ta Anti­qua was also co-found­ed with Ken LaBarre but most of the books were pro­duced in Cal­i­for­nia. They helped ini­ti­ate a modern revival of the lute. The Method for the Renais­sance Lute sold more than 20,000 copies and helped launch the career of many lutenists play­ing today. It is still avail­able in its 7^th printing.

The other works in this cat­a­log also have had a pro­found impact on the lute world.

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