On Sunday, September 15th at 4:00 p.m., USF music professor John Robison will present a program 

of solo music for the Renaissance lute, the Baroque theorbo, and the Baroque archlute; he will be 

joined by guest artists Maggie Coleman (soprano) and Stephen Roesser (tenor) for some English and 

Italian lute songs.  The first portion of the concert will be devoted to lute music written between c. 

1580 and 1620, the period towards the end of the Renaissance when lute music becomes 

particularly complex in style.  This part of the program will feature music for the highly distinctive 

ten-course late Renaissance lute, including music by various composers from England (Johnson, 

Bacheler), Italy (Melii), Germany (Mertel, Reymann), and the Netherlands (van den Hove, Vallet). For 

this portion of the program Dr. Robison will be performing on a ten-course lute with nineteen strings, 

an instrument that was especially popular with early seventeenth-century composers.  Several 

Elizabethan lute songs will be included on the program, along with seventeenth-century Italian songs 

performed with either a large fourteen-course theorbo or with the archlute.  The final portion of the 

program will feature Dr. Robison performing on the Baroque theorbo and archlute, both of them large 

instruments with two necks and fourteen courses that were immensely popular during the 

seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.  The demanding theorbo and archlute portion of the 

program will include toccatas, ballettos, correntes, and variations by early seventeenth-century Italian 

masters (Alessandro Piccinini, Pietro Paolo Melii, Giovanni Kapsberger), as well as a sonata by one of 

the last composers for the archlute, the early eighteenth-century master Giovanni Zamboni. Several 

sets of lute songs will be featured on the program, including music from both the English (Campion, 

Dowland, Lawes) and the Italian repertories (Caccini, Peri).