Modes of Motion

MOTION

Four Years Later · November 3, 2026

Four years ago, I released Modes of Motion, a five-movement work exploring the hidden sonic possibilities of the guitar through multiphonics, harmonics, and electronic processing.

All the sounds originate from the guitar, but they lead somewhere unexpected: shifting resonances, unusual harmonies, evolving textures, and musical gestures that seem to bend our perception of time.

Looking back, I find an interesting connection between this work and my more recent historical projects.

In IN SEARCH OF…, I explore the hidden history of the guitar — forgotten music, overlooked relationships, and discoveries waiting to be brought back into the light.

In Modes of Motion, I explore the hidden possibilities of the instrument itself.

One is a search through time. The other is a search through sound.

Both are about listening beyond the obvious and discovering what has been there all along.

This is avant-garde music. This is deep ambient listening. You might like it. :)

Music composed and performed by Ted Mann

Released November 3, 2022.

Before The Music Was Written

A new recording is now available, featuring two works by the Spanish vihuelist Miguel de Fuenllana, drawn from his remarkable collection Orphénica lyra, published in 1554.

The first piece, Pleni sunt coeli, is a duet based on the vocal polyphonic tradition. Here, music originally conceived for voices finds another life through the sound of the vihuela. The interweaving musical lines retain their independence, while taking on a new character through the instrument.

The second work, Tiento del segundo tono, takes us into a different musical world. The tiento offers a space for exploration, where musical ideas unfold through the particular possibilities of the vihuela.

But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Fuenllana's work lies in his own account of how music was created.

In the prologue to Orphénica lyra, Fuenllana describes a process in which music was first played on the vihuela and only afterward committed to tablature.

This is a remarkable glimpse into the creative world of the sixteenth-century musician. The written page was not necessarily the beginning of the music. The instrument itself could be the place where musical ideas first took shape.

It is a small but revealing detail, one that invites us to reconsider the relationship between improvisation, composition, and the written musical tradition.

More than four centuries later, these pieces continue to offer a glimpse into that world.

The journey continues.

A mono single of Luis Milan on vihuela 10/26/26

THE MILÁN PAVAN AND FANTASIA

Luis de Milán · Pavana I & Fantasía XIII

Ted Mann · Vihuela

The music of Luis de Milán takes us back to one of the earliest printed collections of music for a plucked instrument: El Maestro, published in Valencia in 1536.

This new single brings together two contrasting works from that remarkable collection: Pavana I and Fantasía XIII.

The Pavana begins with the measured, chordal character of a dance. Yet, as the music unfolds, unexpected passages emerge—moments of movement and invention that seem to reach beyond the dance itself.

The Fantasía takes us somewhere different. Here, musical ideas seem to develop freely, almost as though the instrument is discovering its own possibilities as the music progresses. Milán himself makes an intriguing connection between certain fantasias and the Italian pavan, suggesting that the boundaries between these forms were not always so clearly defined.

This recording is presented in mono, bringing the sound of the double-course vihuela into a particularly intimate focus. The two strings of each course create a subtle chorusing effect, giving the instrument a distinctive depth and presence.

Two pieces, two different approaches to musical invention, and a glimpse into a world in which the vihuela was helping to shape the language of instrumental music.

Somewhere within these early printed pages, a much larger story remains hidden.

The journey continues.

FORM AND TEXTURE — THE JOURNEY CONTINUES----- The Album is OUT

Click on the cover

FORM AND TEXTURE — THE JOURNEY CONTINUES

The album is out. But in many ways, the journey is only beginning.

For years, I’ve been fascinated by a hidden chapter in the history of the guitar — a story that reaches back through centuries of music, manuscripts, instruments, and the musicians who brought them to life.

FORM AND TEXTURE is my first step into that world.

The music of Joan Ambrosio Dalza, Franciscus Bossinensis, Vincenzo Capirola, and Francesco da Milano survives across the centuries, preserved in early printed collections and manuscripts. Playing it today, I find music that is mysterious, restless, playful, and unexpectedly beautiful.

And I keep returning to one question:

What if the instruments themselves helped lead the music somewhere new?

This is more than a recording. It is the beginning of an exploration — of sound, touch, texture, and a musical history that may have been hiding in plain sight.

Thank you to everyone who has listened, shared, and joined me on this journey.

FORM AND TEXTURE — Ted Mann.

The search continues.

What Happens?

What happens when you take a piece of music that has been silent to most people for centuries…

…and bring it back to life?

I’ve been spending a long time with music written for instruments that most people today rarely hear — music filled with strange turns, unexpected harmonies, voices crossing and intertwining.

And the more I played it, the less it sounded like history.

It sounded alive.

There is a story here.

I’m beginning to tell it.

A few Days

Something has been waiting in the strings.

FORM AND TEXTURE: An Exploration of Lute Music from the Italian Renaissance

Ted Mann — lute.

Coming in just a few days.

If you'd like to hear it when it arrives, you can pre-save it on Spotify and Apple now:

What is going on here?

Search by clicking on the picture.

This is a double-sided single from the first of five albums. The first album in the series will be released later this month.

Presented here in a mono mix.

What else is going on here?

I am conducting a long intensive research project into the history of fretted stringed instruments and the long path leading to the modern guitar. Through an examination of music, instruments, and manuscripts across the centuries, I am exploring the important role these instruments—and the musicians who played them—had in the development of music itself, a role that has often been overlooked in music theory and history books

So anything else going on?

IN SEARCH OF…

TED MANN — LUTE

Two Renaissance composers.�Two extraordinary pieces.�One instrument.

SIDE A — VINCENZO CAPIROLA 1474–1548�Ricercar

SIDE B — FRANCESCO DA MILANO 1497–1543�Fantasia

Separated by a generation, Capirola and Milano explored what a single fretted instrument could make possible—voices within voices, intricate counterpoint, harmony, and musical invention.

The word ricercar means to search—and Capirola’s music seems to embody that search, taking a musical idea and following it wherever it leads.

Fantasia means imagination—and in Milano’s hands, the lute becomes a place where musical ideas can unfold freely, transform, and become something unexpected.

One searches.One imagines.

Five centuries later, I follow their trail.

Not simply to recreate the past.

But to listen and see for what may have been overlooked.

The manuscripts remain.The music remains.

The search continues. Click to search!

The Search

I am conducting an intensive research project into the early history of fretted instruments and their role in the development of music itself.

I am examining surviving instruments, manuscripts, tablatures, tunings, construction techniques, and the music written for them, looking for evidence of how musicians and composers experimented with musical ideas.

What I instinctively thought—and am increasingly finding—is that these instruments were not simply vehicles for music conceived elsewhere. They were places of experimentation: laboratories for harmony, counterpoint, harmonic movement, cadences, sequences, bass patterns, chordal structures, and more.

In some cases, the music seems to explore ideas that music theory would only later explain and formalize. The instrument and its repertoire appear to be leading the theory rather than simply following it.

Yet the role these instruments and the musicians who played them had in the development of music itself has largely been overlooked.

The evidence is there, often hiding in plain sight.

I am following it wherever it leads.

Blog

Meet my very good friend and mentor..

ELIZABETH PALLETT

There are musicians who play historical instruments.

And then there are musicians who seem to unlock them.

Elizabeth Pallett has become an expert guide and mentor in my own pursuit of understanding the early instruments that lie along the mysterious path to the modern guitar. Along the way, she has also become a truly great friend.

Her world is filled with instruments whose names, shapes, and sounds seem to have come from another time: the many forms of the lute, early guitars, and the extraordinary theorbo—a massive, long-necked member of the lute family whose deep voice once filled the musical spaces of another age.

Each instrument has its own secrets.

Its own construction.

Its own tuning.

Its own technique.

And most importantly—

its own voice.

Elizabeth understands these instruments not simply as artifacts preserved from the past, but as living instruments. She performs on them, studies their traditions, and explores the subtle differences in construction, tuning, technique, and sound that can reveal how musicians of earlier centuries actually made music.

And this is where the story takes us deeper into the past.

If you know anything about the lute, you have heard the name John Dowland.

Four hundred years ago, Dowland died.

But somehow, his music remained.

It crossed the centuries.

His melodies can be intimate and haunting, melancholy and strangely modern—as though a voice from another world has survived the passage of time, waiting for someone to hear it again.

This year marks the 400th anniversary of Dowland’s death. Musicians and scholars around the world have been marking the occasion with concerts, recordings, performances, scholarship, and explorations of the musical world in which Dowland lived and worked.

Elizabeth has taken us into that world in her own remarkable way.

Throughout this anniversary year, she has been releasing a series of video performances devoted to Dowland’s music, accompanied by video diaries that take us beyond the performances themselves.

They lead us into the places connected with Dowland and his contemporaries—the places where they lived, walked, worked, and performed—and then bring us forward again, following Elizabeth as she performs this music today in their footsteps.

The result is more than a series of performances.

It becomes a musical trail through time.

One place.

One instrument.

One piece of music.

One voice reaching across four centuries.

Fragments of a world that should be silent by now.

And yet, when the strings begin to vibrate, something happens.

For a moment, the distance between then and now seems to disappear.

The instruments cease to be historical objects.

They become voices.

Through Elizabeth’s lutes, early guitars, theorbo, and her performances of Dowland, we are given a chance to listen for something almost impossible to recover:

the sound of the past itself.

And perhaps that is what makes Elizabeth’s work so compelling.

She isn't simply playing old music.

She is following its trail.

Through instruments.

Through manuscripts.

Through places.

Through the music itself.

Searching for traces of something that time has almost erased.

Subscribe to her youtube channel here… you won’t be sorry!