Punk Lutenist Jozef Van Wissem Wages Four-Decade 'Lute Wars'
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- Jozef Van Wissem owns eight lutes—some bespoke, including a 14-course theorbo with 'sacrilegious' inbuilt mics and a foldable neck—and has released nearly 50 titles, with a new album, This Is My Blood, due this May
- Van Wissem composed his new album for filmmaker Joaquim Pujol's documentary Màquina, about a psychedelic trip in the Colorado desert as a cure for alcoholism; the first and last pieces are improvised slide compositions using a bottleneck
- Van Wissem scored Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive with Jarmusch's band SQÜRL, and says at live shows 'the first people who leave are the classical people' when he experiments
- Van Wissem frames his career as a four-decade fight with academic lute circles, whom he accuses of 'demeaning' the instrument and refusing to put microphones inside it; he wants the lute restored to its pre-1800 status as a pop instrument found in taverns and brothels
- Van Wissem's nonconformity traces to early-1980s Dutch punk squatting scenes; he played in Mort Subite in 1978, toured Yugoslavia with Desert Corbusier, met Laibach in Ljubljana, and called it 'a big influence on how I do things'
- Van Wissem moved to New York in 1993 after running riotous Groningen bar De Klok, and studied under lutenist Patrick O'Brien, 'a very open guy, and a Vietnam vet who had gone to prison for refusing to go back'
Why it matters: Van Wissem's crusade reframes the lute as a loud, electric-friendly rock instrument with built-in mics, directly challenging the academic establishment that he says has suppressed the instrument for 250 years. For a field where students still must 'play these notes exactly as they are on the page,' his built-in mic approach and slide-bottleneck improvisation could reshape how a new generation encounters the lute—or deepen the standoff with traditionalists.
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