What is a lute song?
The lute song is a musical composition written for at least one voice with accompaniment by a lute. Many songs were written for four voices singing in harmony, but even those songs could be performed with simply the melody voice and lute. The texts for lute songs were generally lyric poems – many of which were written by the composers themselves. Thomas Campion, one of the more famous song composers of the time, wrote a treatise on poetry and set his own poems to music. Others, such as Thomas Morley, set other people’s lyric poems.
