The abc music standard with many links on internet can
be found here: The abc homepage
For early music there is however not much in abc. Some
renaissance songs set in abc with pdf files can be found on the
site of Laura Conrad: Laura
Conrad's page
Another nice site with abc links Frank
Nordberg's abc site
The English Dancing Master by John Playford (1651)
Abctab2ps is based on abc2ps. On Jef Moines page you
can find many links to abc music and utilities like a gui system
for typing abc music. Jef Moine's page
The following link has no lute music but a vast number of traditional
tunes abc format. Might be useful resource for early musicians which also
play traditional stuff (this link is from Leonard Williams)
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/music/Info/RRTuneBk/tunebook.html
Another very big archive with much music to be downloaded is
Werner Icking Music Archive All music is in postscript or pdf.
In this archive baroque lute music is still missing. No special reason for
that. This lack will be solved in time, in the meantime you can find lots of
nice baroque lute music in the following sites:
Roman Turovsky's archives:
http://polyhymnion.org/swv/opus-1.html
http://polyhymnion.org/swv/opus-2.html
Ofcourse wayne cripps' tab archive is a well-known place to find all kind of
lutemusic which unfortunately is kind of 'frozen' due to commercial programs.
Still many good pieces to find in:
http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute/AboutTab.html
If you were looking for a free program to typeset music with lots
of features, you are surely a little bit disappointed by the abc
language. If you're a linux user you will surely not be disappointed by
lilypond
A very nice program with good support written in python. But you
have to learn again a very tricky syntax, and compiling a recent version
of the program needs unfortunately quite some experience with linux.
But the program noteedit has all the GUI (graphical user interface) features
you wish and exports directly lilypond files. Highly recommended although
basso continuo features are still not supported.
noteedit project page for linux
Several lute society websites have a load of information. They publish nice books,
you can find instrument maker addresses, and you can download sound
clips.
Visit the following the links:
The English Lute Society
The Dutch Lute Society
The Lute Society of America
The French Lute Society
The German Lute Society
The German Lute Society
The Lute Society of Japan
And their european department:
Lute & Early Guitar Society of Japan Europe
The Belgian Lute Academy