Instruments
Lute
A lute is both a specific instrument and a broader instrument type. The specific instrument is a relative (and ancestor) of the guitar that flourished in the Renaissance era of European music (roughly 1450-1600). It is made of wood, with a body shaped like half a hard-boiled egg but characteristically made of individual ribs of wood. The instrument usually has five pairs of strings (sometimes the highest-pitched string is not doubled), a fretted fingerboard, and a pegged head that extends at an angle from the fingerboard. The ancestors of the lute itself, and of most other European plucked stringed instruments, were Arabic; the word "lute" is derived from the Arabic equivalent, oud. Pop uses of the lute are generally restricted to compositions that evoke historical phases of European culture--the recordings of Mannheim Steamroller, for example. World music recordings often credit player who performs on a "lute" in the more general sense of the word--on a plucked stringed instrument whose strings run parallel to its soundboard.