Jozef Van Wissem is doing battle with tradition — armed with a 24-string lute and a bottleneck slide.
“When I do this at a show, the first people who leave are the classical people,” he says. “They can’t stand it. The experimental music people love it.”
For the Dutch minimalist composer, the centuries-old instrument isn’t a museum piece. It’s a vehicle for reinvention.
Van Wissem is known largely for his work with director Jim Jarmusch. In addition to releasing albums with the indie cinema icon, he’s scored several of Jarmusch’s films and collaborated with the director’s band SQÜRL on the soundtrack to Only Lovers Left Alive.
As he explains in a new interview with The Guardian, his journey to the lute came after years in the Dutch punk underground, playing electric guitar with the bands Mort Subite and Desert Corbusier. While touring in Yugoslavia with the latter act, they met Laibach, the Slovenian industrial group whose theatrical, concept-driven music made a lasting impression.
“They were a big influence on how I do things: the idea of making something based on one strong idea.”
By the early ’90s, however, Van Wissem had grown disillusioned with contemporary guitar rock.
“I saw Nirvana at Vera in Groningen,” he says. “But I just became bored with it all. It was the perfect time to start playing the lute.”
He found something radically different in the instrument. Developed around 3,000 B.C., the lute became one of Europe’s most prominent instruments during the Medieval and Renaissance periods.
By the Baroque era it had evolved into a complex instrument with as many as 24 strings arranged in 13 courses — strings played together as one — and plucked with a quill. Its popularity declined in the 18th century as keyboard instruments came to dominate in classical music. By the 20th century, acoustic and electric guitar had taken over as the predominant fretted stringed instruments.
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?”
— Jozef Van Wissem
For Van Wissem, the lute’s obscurity was part of the attraction, as was the technical challenge of mastering such a complex instrument.
After moving to New York City in 1993, he began studying with lutenist Patrick O'Brien — “a very open guy, and a Vietnam vet who had gone to prison for refusing to go back,” Van Wissem says.
O’Brien’s outlook appealed to him, but when Van Wissem later returned to The Hague and showed up for his first formal lesson, he was dismayed.
“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?”
Part of the lute’s appeal is its sound, of course, but its history also reflects centuries of experimentation. The instrument has been played in a wide variety of tunings, and its repertoire spans everything from courtly Renaissance music to modern interpretations.
Van Wissem pushes that spirit of experimentation further by electrifying his instruments — an act he mockingly calls “sacrilegious.” One of his lutes, a black 14-course theorbo, features built-in microphones and a foldable neck designed for travel.
He also does something almost unheard of among lutenists: using a bottleneck slide. The technique can be heard on the opening and closing tracks of the Only Lovers Left Alive soundtrack.
“When I do this at a show, the first people who leave are the classical people,” Van Wissem says. “They can’t stand it. The experimental music people love it.”
Still, he believes the instrument may be finding new life.
Van Wissem praises the open-minded approach of Spanish lutenist Miguel Serdoura, widely regarded as one of the instrument’s leading players. And he says younger musicians are beginning to experiment with the instrument in unexpected ways.
I want to update it and also make it sexy again.”
— Jozef Van Wissem
“I’ve seen a lot of kids that do stuff like copy Metallica on the lute.”
Yet mastering the instrument remains a formidable undertaking.
“To study lute you need a good six years, and six hours a day.”
It’s the kind of commitment that leaves little room for distraction — and one reason the instrument still sits outside the mainstream. As Van Wissem told The Washington Post, that barrier is exactly what he hopes to break down.
“I want to update it and also make it sexy again. It’s not interesting to a lot of people because it comes with all this baggage, this set of rules that these academics gave the instrument, that keeps it in a museum.”
