In lovely memory of Jim Tyler

In ricordo di James Tyler
(obituary dal Guardian)





The American lutenist James Tyler, who has died suddenly aged 70, was a versatile force in the world of early music. During the 1970s and 80s, he performed and recorded in London with such groundbreaking period-instrument ensembles as Musica Reservata under Michael Morrow, the Consort of Musicke, the Julian Bream Consort and the Early Music Consort of London under David Munrow. In 1977, a year after Munrow's death, Jim founded his own ensemble, the London Early Music Group.

As a dynamic soloist and ensemble musician, he performed extensively in chamber music series and festivals throughout the world. He made more than 60 recordings, including two popular versions of Vivaldi's Concerto for Two Mandolins and Strings, with the English Concert under Trevor Pinnock and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields under Neville Marriner.

He composed and arranged music for four productions of a BBC television cycle of Shakespeare plays, including Romeo and Juliet, and Henry VIII. He can also be heard – and seen – in the film Mary, Queen of Scots (1971), for which one of his off-screen duties was to instruct Glenda Jackson, as Elizabeth I, in the art of smashing lutes, in this instance over the head of Daniel Massey, playing Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Jim recounted how the prop man wheeled in 10 historically accurate balsa lutes, most of which were destroyed in the interest of securing the perfect take.

Born in Hartford, Connecticut, Jim started to study the mandolin, tenor banjo and the classic five-string banjo in 1954 with Walter Kaye Bauer, who gave him a first-class grounding in technique and musicianship. Jim found that the techniques he acquired on the circa-1900 gut-strung banjo were almost akin to those for the renaissance lute and baroque guitar – much more so than the Segovia-style classical guitar technique that many of his contemporaries were using on the lute.

A recital by the lute virtuoso Joseph Iadone led to Jim falling in love in his late teens with the instrument's "luscious" sound and extraordinarily rich repertoire. Iadone, a member of the early music ensemble New York Pro Musica and teacher at the Hartt School of Music in Hartford, accepted him as a private student.

In 1963 Jim joined the Pro Musica, and made his recording debut. That year he also performed with the Consort Players and Basil Rathbone in An Elizabethan Evening at the White House before the Kennedy family and their guest, the Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxembourg. With Max Morath and the Original Rag Quartet, he toured the US, recording and playing the tenor and five-string banjo on such vintage television shows as the Bell Telephone Hour and The Dinah Shore Show.

In 1968 Jim left the US to work in Munich with Thomas Binkley, director of the Studio der Frühen Musik. By the start of the following year, he was in London, having realised it was the true centre of early music activity. He married Joyce Geller, a former screenwriter, in 1975, and she subsequently took over the management of his career.

While on tour, Jim visited libraries to study original books and manuscripts for his numerous publications on early instruments, their repertories and performing practices. For Oxford University Press he wrote The Guitar and Its Music: From the Renaissance to the Classical Era (with Paul Sparks, 2002); The Early Mandolin (with Sparks, 1989); and his first book, The Early Guitar: A History and a Handbook (1980), as well as numerous articles in the various New Grove dictionaries and the journal Early Music.

In the early 1980s, The Early Guitar was the sole comprehensive guide to the instrument. It could have been written only by a consummate performer-scholar, and inspired my own journey from Australia to California 20 years ago to study with Jim. It also led to a continuing revival of the instrument.

From 1986 until his retirement in 2006, Jim was professor of music and director of the master's and doctoral degree programs in early music performance that he founded at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

He was working recently with a team to establish the earliest known recording machine and preparing an article on the 19th-century banjo composer Paul Eno. His final publication, A Guide to Playing the Baroque Guitar, will be published in February.

He is survived by Joyce.

• James Henry Tyler, lutenist, teacher and writer, born 3 August 1940; died 23 November 2010

Arto Wikla, ricordando Jim, recentemente
scomparso, ha pubblicato questo Preludio
che Jim nel 1987-88 (?) gli dette, dicendogli
scherzosamente di averlo trovato in
soffitta.

Esercizio di arpeggi sulla tiorba, e al tempo
stesso bellissimo preludio di Jim, regalato
anni fa ad Arto Wikla