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The Early Music Forum of Scotland

 Early Music Forum of Scotland logo

SYMPOSIUM ON BOWED STRING MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

Meeting organised by the Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments with the Early Music Forum of Scotland and the Viola da Gamba Society of Great Britain

2-3 June 2000

Symposium details: www.euchmi.ed.ac.uk/fbpp.html

Abstracts of Papers

http://www.music.ed.ac.uk/euchmi/fbta.html

 

A gift from the viol? Scordatura in Scottish Fiddle Music

Mary Anne Alburger,
Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen, U.K.

In the time of Queen Elizabeth the important music was played on lutes and viols, with the violin little more than a curiosity, used for the dance music she so scandalously enjoyed, even in her old age.

It took the virtuosity of David Baltzar, a German violinist who arrived in London around 1656, whose hand "was quick and could run it insensibly to the end of the fingerboard", to accelerate the progress of the violin into the instrument of choice for musical society.

Some players had trouble with the new way of tuning the violin, in perfect fifths: Anthony ˆ Wood taught himself the violin by ear, tuning it in fourths, while one Richard Rhodes played with the violin held between his knees. Where Baltzar was particularly clever in promoting the new instrument was in his compositions in scordatura tuning, where any or all of the strings could be tuned to different intervals which were not perfect fifths, and would perhaps have made aspiring violinists such as Wood and Rhodes feel at home.

London publisher John Playford soon produced "Instructions for the Treble Violin" in his Brief Introduction to the Skill of Musick in 1658. The dual-purpose book included both tablature and staff notation, thus enabling viol players to begin the conversion to new ways of holding, fingering, and bowing the trendy fiddle. There was a lengthy cross-over period, when musicians played both instruments, and for some time the viol was thought superior, especially the treble, in fantasia suites, probably because the recent converts to the violin had not yet mastered the new techniques, but gradually viols went out of fashion as the violin family became more popular.

Continental composers such as Biber (1644-1704) and Tartini (1692-1770) published pieces in scordatura tunings, but the fashion particularly caught on with Scottish amateur fiddlers and composers, whose manuscripts from the early eighteenth century show many examples of scordatura variation sets, some published at the time, by Scots Bremner, Oswald and the Gows, others as recently as the 1990s, by David Johnson.

Aside from the novelty value of scordatura, and the possibility that it served as a bridge for players converting from the viol to the violin, its popularity in Scotland throughout the eighteenth century may have come in part from the presence in vernacular music of bagpipesÐ not only the Great Highland bagpipes, but lowland and border pipes which provided a drone which would have been familiar to Scottish musicians and could be imitated to some extent through the accompaniment one player could provide for him or herself, when playing with scordatura tunings.

This paper will include musical illustrations of scordatura in use, particularly Scottish dance music sets and bagpipe laments, using violins from the Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments, and from the Collection of University Music, University of Aberdeen.

 

Bowed Instruments in Azerbaijani Music

Alla Bayramova and Mejnun Kerimov,
State Museum of Azerbaijani Musical Culture, Baku
assisted by Munis Sharifov, director of the Museum Ensemble of Old Instruments

Through all its history Azerbaijani Musical culture has used 4-stringed bowed instruments: ikri, bowed tanbour, chagane and kamancha. Information about the first two can be found only in one of the musical treatises of Abdul Kadir Maraghi (14th c.).The third instrument, the chagane, is more widely known and was played more, but only the latter, the kamancha, survived.

The chagane was mentioned in Azerbaijani medieval classical poetry, in the works of Gatran Tabrizi, Imadeddin Nasimi and Seid Azim Shirvani.It was chiefly an ensemble instrument and existed in Azerbaijan until the 1st half of the 19th c. inclusive. We know only two paintings with its depiction: the miniature Persian painting of unknown artist and the Russian artist G.Gagarin's Dances of Shamakha (1840).

Chagane is 4-stringed instrument and consists of a pear shaped body with a long spire and long round neck. When being played, it is held vertically on the floor between the performer's knees. It was made of mulberry or pine tree.

Working for the State Museum of Azerbaijani Musical Culture, Mejnun Kerimov recreated the chagane in 1981. This instrument has become a museum exhibit and now it has been played by Munis Sharifov in the Museum's Old Musical Instruments Ensemble.

Today, the only bowed traditional instrument in Azerbaijan is the kamancha, which occupies a much bigger place in musical history, although its timbre yields to that of the chagane.

The kamancha, depicted in the medieval miniature paintings of Aga Mirek, Mir Seid Ali(The repnesentatives of the famous Tabriz school), is similar to the contemporary one. The greatest poet of Azerbaijani Renaissance (12th c.) Nizami Ganjevi wrote about kamancha in his poem Khosrov and Shirin.

In the beginning it was 1-stringed, by the 17th c. It was 3-stringed and since the very beginning of the 20th c. It has become 4-stringed. Its body is ball-shaped with a long round neck and metal leg. The kamancha is made from the mulberry or nut tree with a sound membrane on its face side, made from fish skin or fish bladder. Its length is 700-800 mm. The bow is a straight or slightly concave stick with a band of horsehair, which is loosely stretched. When playing the kamancha, is held vertically resting its leg on the player's knee. The bow is held in the right hand, with the palm facing up.

Often its body and neck are traditionally adorned with inlaid mother-of-pearl or bone. Some rare contemporary museum exhibits are adorned with carvings.

This instrument is played as both a soloist and orchestra instrument, and this is confirmed by museum photographs from the end of the 19th c.

 

Borrowings, Conventions, and Transformations in English Viol Consort Fantasias

Bruce Bellingham,
University of Connecticut

Among composers of many cultures throughout the Renaissance, a common method of creating new music involved the borrowing or adapting of materials from earlier masters. Artistic emulation was often the basis of pedagogical instruction, but continued as well into the practice of a mature composer whose new piece might well have derived its impetus from a composition by an older master. Artistic emulation or imitation {frequently termed imitatio in the Renaissance, and hearkening back to the Classical orator Marcus Fabius Quintilian (1st century A.D.)} could be intended as a kind of competition or as a manifestation of homage to a previous composer. Howard Mayer Brown has warned that "it is always difficult to be certain that a composer really intended such references in a style so filled with clichis and conventions," and although these remarks pertained to 15th-c Burgundian and French music, they could just as well apply to English instrumental music around the turn of the 16th into the 17th century. Moreover, the types of compositional emulation in Elizabethan and Jacobean fantasias for consort of Viols allow for this study of conventions in a musical style, and their adaptation into new artistic expression. The debt which English madrigalian and 'non-madrigalian' borrowers owed to Musica Transalpina, and particularly to Luca Marenzio and Alfonso Ferrabosco the Elder, can be observed in Viol-consort fantasia borrowings and parodies by Wilbye, Dowland, and especially John Coprario. An early Coprario 4-part fantasia will demonstrate that he borrowed motives directly from a Ferrabosco madrigal. In Coprario's 5-part fantasias, textures can be traced to Italianate idioms such as canzonetta and villanella passages found in vocal madrigals, but his later 4-part fantasias manifest stylistic borrowing from the instrumental canzona. Alfonso Ferrabosco the Younger, whose 4-part fantasias constituted the core repertoire in Jacobean manuscripts, developed an instrumental expression far removed from text-dominated madrigal idioms {as found in Coprario, East, and Ward}, and yet his exploitation of expressive conventions can be traced back to Dufay and Josquin, as well as to contemporary countrymen like John Dowland. Such exhaustive pursuit and exploitation of thematic material throughout a composition is more the characteristic of an ensemble ricercar; Ferrabosco's instrumental imitatio incorporates the adaptation or parody of elements from different models, canzona and ricercar. Alfonso's parody of one stylistic element resembles the melodic shape and light rhythmic character of a Balletto by Gastoldi, Morley, or Ward; but the emotional world is profoundly deeper, deriving from and transforming conventions found in Monteverdi's "Echo mormorar l'onde" and Marenzio's "O Voi che sospirate". In such cases, we are dealing with the transplanting of Italian idioms onto English soil and the resultant artistic mutations.

 

On viol string acoustics

D. Murray Campbell,
University of Edinburgh

[abstract to follow]

 

Sound and image - the iconography of strings

J. Patricia Campbell,
University of Edinburgh

[abstract to follow]

 

Form and Gesture in Coprario's Music for Violin, Bass Viol and Organ

Christopher D.S. Field,
University of Edinburgh
with Alison Crum, bass viol, and John Kitchen, organ

Between 1622 and 1625 John Coprario composed 24 fantasia-suites for an ensemble known as "Coprario's Musique" which was attached to the household of Charles, Prince of Wales (later King Charles I). The three-movement suites - each consisting of a fantasia, almaine and galliard for one or two treble violins, bass viol and organ - introduced a new kind of instrumental texture into private chamber music in England and established a pattern that was to be imitated and developed by William Lawes, Hingeston, Jenkins, Christopher Gibbons. This illustrated paper will concentrate on aspects of Coprario's instrumental style as exemplified in two of his suites for one violin, Nos. 2 (G minor) and 11 (C major), each of which will be performed in its entirety.

 

Who Made the Viols `by’ Henry Jaye ?

Michael Fleming,
The Open University, U.K.

We interrogate antique viols to discover what they can tell us of original musical practices. However, they are not always what they seem, because the instruments we see today embody centuries of changing attitudes both to the repertory and to instruments. Published information about viols is particularly hazardous, so a detailed understanding of the nature of old instruments and the way that they have been documented is required to interpret it. This paper will describe the usual ways in which viols depart from their original state, and introduce a protocol I have developed for gathering data. The techniques will be exemplified by application to the work of Henry Jaye, who seems to be represented by more surviving instruments than any other English viol maker from this period. All the currently available information about Jaye will be presented and an approach to understanding the work of other makers will be explained.

 

The Frank Temperament for Viols ?

Ulrich Giese,
Berlin

The still life with viol (1671) by Franz Friedrich Frank shows many details of the instrument. Even the position of frets appear sensible.

If one compares the position of all frets to the 5th fret, fret 1 should sound equal tempered, frets 2 to 5 1/6 comma meantone and fret 6 and 7 are too far down. Any perspective distortion is neglected.

So apparently the violist solved the tuning dilemma for the first fret by a compromise. The "wrong" position of the top frets is typically caused by uneven wear of the strings. The rest looks like an accurate record, what a particular 17th century musician perceived as proper tuning.

As plausiblility of fret positions can be measured, this sort of research could give further insight into practical tuning matters as well as the accuracy of details of painted instrumends.

 

Henry Jaye, Tobias Hume and Jacobean Viol Pitches

Ian Harwood,
Hitchin, U.K.

The largest English viol known from James Is reign (c80 cm string length) and the smallest (c34cm) bear Henry Jaye labels. Before 1650 viols had plain gut strings, theoretically implying both an actual sounding pitch and a 2:1 string-length relationship between bass and treble tuned an octave apart. The extreme Jaye sizes cannot have been so tuned. The large bass size, confirmed by historical evidence, requires a treble of c40 cm string length. The smallest Jaye suggests tuning a fourth higher than this. Tobias Hume's 1607 Poeticall Musicke includes pieces involving two sizes of viol, both called bass but tuned a fourth apart. The higher would be the bass to the tiny Jaye treble, but it would also be the tenor to the larger bass, so why did not Hume call it a tenor? Were there two pitch standards a fourth apart at the time? Clues and speculations are offered.

 

The Viols in the Breughel Painting Allegory and the Sense of Hearing

Michael Heale,
Guildford, U.K.

[abstract to follow]

 

on the viol and violin maker Barak Norman

Ben Hebbert,
London Guildhall University

Barak Norman is generally regarded as the most popular of the English viol makers from the seventeenth century, but a second look at his surviving instruments shows that this is due in part to the large number of violas da gamba which survive. Nevertheless he remains an important figure but little understood for his contribution to both viol and violin making in England. Recent research offers a new perspective on the life of one of very few viol makers to gain admission to the City of London, his innovations in instrument construction and the sort of influences that determined his work. Norman did not work alone, and the evidence for this ranges from labels which make this clear to subtlties in the execution of his instruments. An attempt is made to reconstruct the community of craftsmen and journeymen that assisted in the construction of these instruments. It is hoped that this paper will proffer an insight into an aspect of the viola da gamba that has until now remained in obscurity.

 

On the Documentation of Bowed String Musical Instruments

Rudolf Hopfner,
Sammlung alter Musikinstrumente, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

The documentation of musical instruments is one of the main tasks of museums. Before beginning with a documentation one has to raise the following questions:

According to this spectrum of possibilities, the nature of a documentation will be different.

Presentation of different methods: Traditional methods, in use from the 19th century onwards:

In preparing a technical drawing you have to deal with the following questions:

A solution offered by our collection is a precise documentation of the instrument in the present condition and a conjectural reconstruction of an alleged original condition. The main pupose of the lecture is not only the presentation of different technologies but the question, how this methods best can be applied.

 

Violin Making in Turin 1800-1870

Philip J. Kass,
William Moennig & Son, Ltd, U.S.A.

This paper will consider the evolution of style within that school and its major proponents - Pressenda, Rocca, and the Guadagnini family. It will describe the French influences, the import of talents from the provinces, and the relationships between the musical institutions of that time with the makers and their personal styles.

 

The Viola da Gamba and Temperament: a Historical Survey and a Practical Manual

Sarah Manthey,
Mölln, Germany

This paper begins with a simple exposition of the problems involved in playing in tune on frets. An examination of early sources (Ganassi, Gerle, Mersenne, etc) includes a brief description of the historical context Some historical and modern solutions are presented in easy-to-read graphs.

 

Talbot, Praetorius, Mersenne: the Uses - and Abuses - of Documentary Sources

Darryl Martin,
University of Edinburgh

This paper will consider, with special reference to bowed string instruments how the best known written documentary sources of the seventeenth century are able to further our knowledge when researching musical instruments of the period.

There are comparatively few surviving instruments of the seventeenth century that have remained unaltered, or, in some instances, survive at all. Well-known written sources by authors such as Talbot, Praetorius and Mersenne have often been used by modern researchers as an extra resource when studying this era, sometimes using writings as the only, or the major, element when constructing their argument. The reliability of the original works will be discussed, as well as problems of interpretation. The various methods used by these authors will also be discussed, highlighting both advantages and disadvantages of each method.

 

Raphael the Father of the Bowed String Instruments: the Discovery of the Arched Belly

Toon Moonen,
Maastricht, Netherlands

The arched belly of the viola da gamba in Raphael's painting The Ecstasy of St Cecilia had an enormous impact on the construction of stringed instruments. My talk will deal with the reasons for Raphael's design and with the construction. The aim of the design was to circumvent the problem of a flat belly collapsing. In order to do so, the belly had to be reinforced with transverse ribs, which hampered expression. Raphael's basic principles were that the belly should not collapse and that it should be capable of vibrating effectively. His solution was to construct the central section in the form of a parabolic bridge. To allow the belly to resonate effectively, the central section was left thick, in the shape of a fish, and the area around it was shaved as thin as possible. The background will be demonstrated using slides and I will deal with the influence of the design in the ensuing years, including the failures. Information on the discovery of the Raphael gamba and on the use of perspective and symbolism to determine the dimensions is given in my article in the May 1995 number of The Strad.

 

"Viella videtur praevalere": New Perspectives on the Supremacy of the Medieval Vielle

Joseph Morin,
University of Maryland, Baltimore

Several late thirteenth-century musical treatises, including those by Johannes de Grocheio and Jerome of Moravia, characterize the vielle as "first" among musical instruments. During this period the vielle moved from intellectual obscurity into the lofty realm of medieval music theory that finds it associated with the most sophisticated musical material and procedures. Most modern scholarship accepts the vielle's newfound supremacy at face value, representing the recognition of the instrument's intrinsic musical value as worthy of discussion. Notwithstanding this view, an examination of the vielle and its prestige in other thirteenth-century academic discourse demonstrates that its newly acquired position is not primarily based on its inherent musical attributes. It appears rather to be inherited from antiquity, fostered by a view of stringed instruments associated with the powerfully influential writings of Aristotle as transmitted through the Islamic writers Avicenna, Averr=F6es and others. Seen in this light, the context of the vielle's supremacy takes on new meaning, and necessitates a reevaluation of its position in the tradition of late thirteenth-century music theory and its implications for musicianship.

 

on the Panmure manuscripts (Ste. Colombe in particular) in the National Library of Scotland

Thomas Munck,
University of Glasgow

[informal talk about the Panmure manuscripts]

 

The Cello in Scotland

Brenda Neece,
University of Oxford

The cello has had a distinctive role in Scotland - men of all classes and levels of learning played the cello. In addition to street musicians and professionals, aristocrats, soldiers and professors played the instrument. The cello's widespread usage centred on traditional Scottish dance music, most commonly as accompaniment for fiddlers, but also, occasionally, serving as the melody instrument playing the fiddle tunes as solos. However, information on individual cellists and the instruments they used is scarce and usually only mentioned in conjunction with biographical details of prominent fiddlers. The cello's history in Scotland is even further tied to that of the fiddle - the two instruments were considered closely related family members, and many fiddlers played both the big and little fiddle as needed. This paper focuses on the cello's role in Scotland, including the connection between the cello and the fiddle, and some Scottish cellists from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries.

 

The Chest of Viols Reconsidered

Annette Otterstedt,
Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin

The title is based on an article by Gordon Dodd (1971) and was chosen because the author considers it useful to put the same question every generation, with increased source knowledge. As many sources (mostly German) claim a mixture of violins and viols, it is considered whether this mixture was more widely used throughout Europe. The question arises what parts were suitable for the violin resp. the treble viol in d, and which parts remain for the bass violin. The paper offers new findings about early viols and their morphology and building techniques, and considers sizes and compatibilities.

 

on the problems of balancing public access, museum-style preservation and playability

Frances Palmer,
Royal Academy of Music, London

 

The Design and Construction of the Baroque Baryton

Terence M. Pamplin,
London Guildhall University

The Baroque Baryton, invented c 1620 is essentially a combination of two instruments, identified by J.G. Krause in the introduction to his IX Partien for Viola Paradon (c 1700) as the 'Viola da Gamba and the Manual'. This combination creates essentially a Lyra Viol played from tablature, with an independent wire strung plucked bass instrument of nine to twenty four strings with the characteristics of the Bandora. To accommodate the dual function of the players left hand, design features must allow for the independence of the fingers to fret the upper manual finger board of the Viola da Gamba and for the thumb to simultaneously pluck the lower wire strung manual. This dichotomy leads directly to an unique stringing disposition, neck, bridge and belly design. A feature of this complex design is the excitation of the coupled vibration of both sets of strings and the resulting tonal quality popularly termed "sympathetic vibration".

 

François-Xavier Tourte: Recent Archival Discoveries

Stewart Pollens,
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The French bow maker François-Xavier Tourte, more commonly known as François Tourte or Tourte le jeune, is often referred to as "the inventor of the modern bow," or "the Stradivari of the bow." His bows, dating from the end of the eighteenth century and the early decades of the nineteenth, had a marked effect upon the timbre of violins and upon performance practice, enabling new forms of expression and articulation to be developed, and in particular, facilitating the increased use of legato. François Joseph Fétis's entry in the second, expanded edition of his Biographie universelle des musiciens et bibliographie générale de la musique (1860-65) has until recently been the only source of biographical information about François Tourte. Some thirty documents recently discovered in French archives provide further fresh insight into this maker's life and work.

 

Criteria of Early Bows

Hans Reiners,
Berlin

All essential details of construction of early bows, such as choice of wood, shapes of tips and sticks, mortises, nuts, finials, flutings, etc. are to be elaborated in the light of contemporary good craft, availability of tools and materials, as well as their functional significance both technically and musically, cross-matching material and iconographic evidence. These criteria are to be applied to a selection of extant originals of varying degrees of creditability and of the available relevant literature. Technical details will be explained comprehensibly with the aid of slides and a generous number of sketched illustrations.

 

The Viols of Henry Smith

Roger Rose,
West Dean College, Chichester

This paper will discuss in detail the three known examples of Smiths work, of which one was restored by myself. Dimentions and suggested string lengths with their implications on pitch and tuning will also be covered. It is hoped that some of the information gained from the study of these instruments helps to identify other viols and adds to our rather limited knowledge of the early 17th century viol.

 

George Thomson's Editions as Source for Haydn's Revisions to Violin Parts of his Folksong Arrangements

Marjorie Rycroft,
University of Glasgow

Haydn's settings of Scottish, Welsh and Irish folksongs commissioned by Edinburgh publisher George Thomson are available to us chiefly through the MS copies Thomson received from Vienna, and the editions Thomson himself published. The former, mainly in the hand of known copyists, account for practically every song Thomson published under Haydn's name, together with a number of songs which were never published at all.

Thomson appears to have made some minor editorial changes to violin and voice parts, usually simplifying them to ease a potential technical problem. Several discrepancies between the MS material and Thomson's editions appear to be of this kind. There are, however, examples of more extensive revisions. Among them is a set of codas for six songs, one of a very few items known to have reached Thomson in Haydn's own hand. A note by Thomson attached to this document refers to the provision by Haydn of new violin parts for a further eight songs. Although the MS in question seems not to have survived, Haydn's revisions can nevertheless be identified with reasonable certainty from the Thomson prints.

 

Baroque Violin Techniques: The "Low" Violin Hold and "French" Bow Hold

Penny Schwarze,
College of St. Scholastica, Duluth MN, USA

This paper focuses on two violin techniques used during the Baroque era: holding the violin below the collarbone and holding the bow with the thumb on the frog. Modern scholars and performers have tended to associate these techniques with amateur performers or with relatively simple music. Strong evidence links each of these techniques, however, with various prominent professional violinists who performed music exploiting the full capacities of the violin. Biber, for example, may well have used a "low" violin hold as well as a thumb-on-frog bowhold. Later, Geminiani gave clear instructions for holding the violin below the collarbone and described an appropriate technique for shifting to and from higher positions. Why would these violinists have used techniques that may seem rather awkward to us? Both techniques favor actions of the right hand and arm, facilitating incisive articulations and efficient sound production.

 

A short examination of the relationship between the design and construction of the members of the violin family and the pitch at which they were intended to be used circa 1540 to 1750

Edward Smith,
Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, Glasgow

Today the members of the violin family serve our musical needs using design parameters first set out nearly 500 years ago. There are numerous examples of early violins, tenors, eight-foot, and sixteen- foot basses and their related forms that are in daily use now, whose age is well over 400 years proving their stability and suitability of purpose.

These instruments, especially the ones made in Italy, consistently provide musicians with a level of function and suitability of purpose unequalled, no, generally un-approached by any instrument made outside the, period 1540 to 1750. This demonstrates a technology our age has neither been able to fully comprehend nor replicate.

Over a period of more than 40 years, my research has revealed the importance of some of the design and constructional features in ways that have neither been recognised nor considered in relation to the various pitch levels that were in use, and how the design and construction was systematically altered to accommodate pitch levels which varied according to purpose or location, and yet were able to maintain a remarkable consistency in the function musicians have found invaluable.

 

La Mort de la Viole en France pendant le dix-huitième siecle: An enquiry into the Viol's fall from grace

Mark Summers,
University of Edinburgh

In this paper I will be looking at the reasons for the decline of the viol in France. Both musical (the Italian influence, the gradual change in the viol's musical role and the general shift towards a more classical approach) and social factors (the decline of royal influence and the move towards public concerts away from court) will be explored.

Further information

Arnold Myers,
Collection of Historic Musical Instruments,
Faculty of Music,
University of Edinburgh,
Reid Concert Hall,
Bristo Square,
EDINBURGH EH8 9AG, U.K.
Tel :: +44 (0) 131 650 2423
Fax :: +44 (0) 131 650 2425
E-mail communications to: euchmi@ed.ac.uk

J. Patricia Campbell,
Department of Fine Art,
University of Edinburgh,
19 George Square,
EDINBURGH EH8 9LD, U.K.
Tel :: +44 (0) 131 650 4123
Fax :: +44 (0) 131 650 6638
E-mail communications to: J.P.Campbell@ed.ac.uk

This page updated: 25.5.00; re-published 14.2.13