Jozef Van Wissem, arguably the world’s most notorious contemporary lutenist, is on a one-man mission to make the lute rock again. The Dutch ex-punk, who has collaborated with indie cinema icon Jim Jarmusch in the band SQÜRL, owns eight lutes, some bespoke with remarkable features. He has created nearly 50 albums, with his latest, This Is My Blood, releasing this May.
A Unique Creative Process
Each Easter, Van Wissem settles down to compose a new record in Warsaw, where the peace of the holiday season allows him to focus. He finds the quiet city more conducive to work than “noisy” Rotterdam, where he also has a flat. During composition, he hears a traditional theme or melody and “repeats” it. “It’s stealing, I admit it,” he says. However, this repetition is not copying; the classical lute repertoire is vast, formed by constant travel and re-notation, and open to interpretation, especially given the lute’s many tunings. His black 14-course theorbo, for instance, features “sacrilegious” inbuilt microphones and a foldable neck, with reentrant tuning that breaks conventional pitch sequences.
Experimental Film Scores
Van Wissem is best known for his film scores, including the soundtrack for Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive with SQÜRL. His new album includes music composed for Joaquim Pujol’s documentary Màquina, about a psychedelic trip in the Colorado desert as a cure for alcoholism. The album’s first and last pieces are improvised slide compositions using a bottleneck, which sounds adventurous. “When I do this at a show, the first people who leave are the classical people. They can’t stand it. The experimental music people love it,” he says.
Battling Academic Tradition
Van Wissem relishes his four-decade battle with accepted academic thought around the lute. He criticizes academic circles for hiding the instrument and demeaning it. His mission is to make the lute “a real pop instrument again,” noting that before its 250-year “disappearance,” the lute was “omnipresent” in brothels, taverns, and courts. He sees parallels in the lute’s “direct, stripped-back emotion” with the stark sound of Coil, an old favorite. However, the “lute wars” with traditionalists frustrate him. Repairs and innovations often lead to standoffs: “They don’t want to put a microphone inside.” Van Wissem claims his many shows require amplification, as it’s “always a bother” telling sound engineers that a lute “needs” to be loud. For him, the lute is a rock instrument meant to blow audiences away.
Punk Roots and Early Career
Van Wissem’s nonconformity stems from his experiences in the Dutch punk scenes of the early 1980s. He immersed himself in squatting, clashes with authority, daily letter-writing, and tape-swaps, listening to Joy Division and hopping over to Belgium and the UK to form cultural alliances. With orange hair, he played in punk band Mort Subite in 1978 and later in new wave act Desert Corbusier, touring Yugoslavia. In Ljubljana, they met Laibach, who profoundly influenced him: “They were a big influence on how I do things: the idea of making something based on one strong idea.” In 1979, soccer fans kicked him out of his Maastricht squat and set it on fire. He moved to Groningen, the Dutch squatting capital, and owned a riotous bar called De Klok from 1988 to 1993. Bored by the increasingly mundane music scene, he saw Nirvana at Vera, Groningen, but felt it was time to start playing the lute.
New York and Lute Studies
With his social life out of hand, Van Wissem gave up being a barman and left for New York in 1993. He studied under lutenist Patrick O’Brien, a “very open guy” and Vietnam vet who had gone to prison for refusing to return to war. Van Wissem found O’Brien’s approach revelatory. But when he tried to study lute in The Hague, he rebelled after one lesson: “It was very boring. You have to play these notes exactly as they are on the page. Which is ridiculous! It’s like listening to a Jimi Hendrix solo, then writing it down in staff notation to play it to your students; why would you do that?”
Future of the Lute
Will anyone take up Van Wissem’s nonconformism? He cites Miguel Serdoura as a great modern player. More generally, “a lot of kids do stuff like copy Metallica on the lute.” But he warns: “To study lute you need a good six years, and six hours a day. And lute people aren’t really listening to Nurse With Wound and Morton Feldman.” This Is My Blood is released on 1 May.
