Joachim van den Hove

Joachim van den Hove (Antwerp, 1567 – The Hague, 1620) was a Flemish-born lutenist, composer, intabulator and teacher, a leading figure in lute music in the Netherlands in the early seventeenth century. His career combined the work of a guild musician with teaching in an aristocratic setting, although it ended in poverty.

His father, Peeter Reynierszoon van Hove, came from Diest and had joined the Antwerp musicians' guild in 1563. After the death of his brother Cornelius in 1581, Joachim took over the leadership of that guild. In 1594 he married Anna Rodius d'Utrecht and settled in Leiden, where that same year he began to establish himself as a lutenist and teacher. His pupils included Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange, and Count Johan Maurits of Nassau, to whom he dedicated Florida (1601) and Delitiae musicae (1612) respectively. He played the lute at several public occasions, among them a banquet in honour of the Venetian ambassador in May 1610, and between 1611 and 1613 he composed solo pieces in tribute to his friend and patron Adam Leenaerts and to various students at the University of Leiden.

The pieces in his hand in the Schele Lute Book bear dates and place names (Angers, Paris, Frankfurt, Venice and Naples), which suggests that he travelled widely between 1614 and 1616. His financial situation, however, changed rapidly: a move to The Hague coincided with money troubles that led to the confiscation of his property in 1616 and the forced sale of his house in 1620. He died in destitution that same year.

His printed output consists chiefly of large anthologies, Florida and Delitiae musicae, which gather and adapt for lute vocal songs and dances from across Europe, with a predominance of Italian authors such as Marenzio, and also numerous English pieces. His own compositions are fewer: seven fantasias, one of them a parody of Giovanni Gabrieli's canzona La spiritata, several preludes, pavans, passamezzi, galliards, allemandes and courantes, as well as some madrigals. Praeludia testudinis (1616) contains twenty-two pieces of his own authorship. His music is written for the Renaissance lute, except for seven pieces in tunings that point towards the Baroque. Specialists value his technical skill and the abundance of his output, though they find little originality in it, since his style hardly evolved over the two decades separating his sources. The copying of some manuscripts has been attributed to him without direct evidence, a question that remains unresolved.

Today he is remembered above all as the compiler and disseminator of a vast body of lute repertoire of his time, and as a witness to the intense musical life of the Netherlands during the transition from the Renaissance to the Baroque.