Another Look at the Viol

Author(s): Robert Hadaway

Source: Early Music, Vol. 6, No. 4 (Oct., 1978), pp. 530-531+533+535+537+539
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3125743
Accessed: 08-05-2017 11:34 UTC

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 Another look at
In his article in the January issue of Early M
6/1), Christopher Hogwood writes: 'French vio
was written for a bigger and slightly differe
the viol ment than those referred to by Ortiz and
Elsewhere in the same issue Marco Pallis states that,
'by and large the later viols are now in a healthy state'.
These opinions, expressed by eminent scholars and
ROBERT HADAWAY musicians, reflect accurately the state of confusion that
exists concerning the nature of the viol. I am neither
scholar nor musician, and would not presume to
question such opinions were it not that my researches
of the past eight years have led me to somewhat
different conclusions. These researches, entirely con-
cerned with reproducing instruments by such makers
as Gasparo da Salo, Giovanni Maria of Brescia,
Zanetto di Michaelis, Gasbar Duiffopruggar, the
Cicilianos and Henry Jaye, have led me to examine a
considerable number of surviving viols. Although my
examinations were made with personal, professional
intentions, they inevitably led to conclusions concern-
ing the structure and nature of the instrument at
various times in its development and in various places,
which in turn brought into question techniques of
playing and the composition and balance of groups of
instruments which I cannot begin to answer.
My own contribution to this debate must remain of
necessity strictly practical. It is concerned with thick-
nesses and struttings, lengths and positions of necks,
bridge heights and string angles and tailpin hitches,
not subjects normally considered in these pages, but of
vital importance to the response of the instrument. An
instrument maker is in a favoured position to be able
to detect alterations made to instruments and to make
informed guesses as to the reasons for them. These
guesses can also be informed by the philosophy of
craftsmanship, no less apparent to him than the
philosophy of the composer is to the musicologist.
It is elsewhere in that excellent article by Marco
Pallis that the key to my argument lies. He goes on to
treat of the very difficult struggle to convince profes-
sional violinists-that most entrenched band of
perfectionists-of the validity of the baroque violin
both a practical and appropriate instrument
playing the music written for it. No such convinci
deemed necessary for violists, since they are alr
playing a baroque instrument, or are they?
Of the viols that I have seen, very few have orig

1. Unnamed, undated bass viol, probably 16th-century Italian.

Brussels Conservatoire Museum

530

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necks. More often, 16th-century viols remain inside of the instrument is a completely empty box.
unaltered rather than 17th-century instruments, since The back and front are very thick, about 7 mm to
the latter fell more easily into the accepted conven- 8 mm, both slightly arched. As you see, top and
tions of the modern viol in shape and size than the middle bouts are quite long, putting the bridge hardly
former. Since in the early part of this century it was more than a third of the way up the belly. There is no
considered virtually impossible to play a bowed instru- purfling, the edges of the front are bevelled with a
ment in a sophisticated way without the modifications shallow gouge down to about 3 mm. The ribs, which
of neck angle, bridge pressure and string tension that increase in depth from about 6 cm at the heel to about
the violin had so successfully responded to, it seems 9.5 cm at the bottom end, are not mitred at the corners
very understandable that the restoration of viols but stuck edge to end on to small corner blocks that
undertaken at this time should have incorporated are not carved into a curve inside, but left roughly
some or all of these alterations. But what was so squared. The neck is fairly short, set on straight, and
successful for the violin is not necessarily so forhas
the
a hole near the heel, probably for a carrying rope.
viol, nor even appropriate. There is very little heel, and the form of the joint
suggests that neck and block are one. The tapering
Most readers of this journal are no doubt well aware
of the structural alterations made to the violin in the fingerboard is stuck to the belly.
19th century, but for the sake of clarity they are these: Raising the bridge of a viol in order to bow the
the neck was replaced with one longer and set back at aseparate strings more easily posed considerable struc-
greater angle to the body, hence the bridge was raised tural problems, which in the case of this instrument
and the strings observed a greater angle of distortion would have hardly been noticed since the front was so
thick. But the developing instrumental styles of the
over it. Together with the greatly increased string
tension which the treatment of gut strings with sul- 16th century were making considerable demands on
phur made possible, these alterations considerably luthiers, and if the instruments were to be thinner and
increased the pressure of the bridge on the belly, quicker in response, steps had to be taken to support
directing far more of the amplitude of the strings'the downward pressure of the bridge. Arching the
vibration into the body of the instrument. Power and belly is a very good solution, and several ways were
attack were the main objectives. The internal struttingfound of doing this. The most obvious is by bending.
of the instrument could not withstand such alteration Gasbar Duiffopruggar worked in Lyons from about
without some modification, and so the bass bar was 1553 to about 157 1. Only three of his viols survive and
replaced with one deeper and often longer. I have been able to see only two of them, as one,
These changes were not those associated with someoriginally belonging to the Donaldson collection,
slight shift of musical style, nor made to accom- seems to have disappeared (I would be very grateful to
modate musicians' unsatisfiable desire for ease of know of its present whereabouts). One is at Brussels,
known as the 'Plan de Paris' because of its marquetry
playing. They were utterly radical changes made to fit
the instrument to a new philosophy of music-making,picture of a plan of Paris on the back. It can be seen by
the
and the means and craftsmanship employed were a alteration to its body and peg box to have been
part of that philosophy. originally a much larger, five-stringed instrument. It
seems to have been cut down all round and re-necked
In contrast to this philosophy of modern bowed-
instrument making and the structure and craftsman-
in the 18th century to make a seven-string viol.
ship by which it is expressed, I should like to present to
you some notes I have made in the course of my work
in copying early viols. The instruments that are
described are, I think, some of the most remarkable
that survive, in their differences of form and structure
and the very disparate regional traditions that must
have produced them.
Illustration 1 shows an unnamed, undated viol of
about 72 cm to 74 cm string length, No. 1429 at the
Brussels Conservatoire Museum. It has no linings, 2. Bass viol by Gasbar Duiffopruggar (also known as Kaspar Tieffenbrucker),
struts or bass bar, no parchment strips or thickening
second half of 16th century, The Hague, Gemeentemuseum.
or marks of a soundpost. Apart from the blocks, (See
theEM 6/1 p. 5)

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Illustration 2 shows the other one, at The Hague, an
instrument of about 72 cm to 74 cm string length. It
too has been altered, but not nearly so radically as the
'Plan de Paris'. The back was originally bent in the
normal place, but has been straightened, making it
slightly longer than the front. The ribs have been cut
down to taper evenly from the heel to the end. The
neck is set on straight and has its original finger-
board, but overlaid with decorations in a later style
and by a different hand. The most interesting part of
the instrument is the belly. It is fairly thin, 21 mm to
4 mm, and is only slightly arched. According to Max
Muller, 'the top is strengthened not only by a kind of
bass bar, but also by a number of small supporting
bars, fitted to this at right angles'.' He draws a
comparison between this and the lute, but it would
seem that this framework enabled the belly to assume
its slight arch both lengthways and sideways, by
bending. This was a very original and idiosyncratic
solution. No other instrument past or present that I
know of uses such a device. Another solution was
already in existence, used in rebecs, fidels, lyrae and
carved citterns. That was to cut down the ribs of the
instrument on either side, leaving the body higher at
either end. In this way a thin belly could be bent about
the vertical axis, making a barrel vault of it.
Two large viols at Oxford, one by Gasparo da Salo
and the other a late 16th-century instrument, are both
made in this way. As you see from illustration 3, the
ribs rise up a good deal at the hook bar, and whereas
the belly of the unsigned instrument is quite flat along
its centre line, the belly of the Gasparo da Salo has
been bent or carved down at the neck end. As well as
being bent, the belly is shaped at the edges into a
rounded form and into decorative ridges at the
corners. This rounding of the edge is found on the
lirone at Brussels.

Also in the region of Venice, the Ciciliano family of

Antonio and his son Batista had been making viols for
perhaps half a century before this in a style that with
some modification became the 'classic' northern
European viol. Illustration 4 shows an unaltered
3. Bass viol by vGasparo da Salo, late 16th century.
O.f1ord, A .hmolean M useum
instrument of about 69 cm to 72 cm string length in
walnut by Batista. Walnut appears quite often in 16th-
century instruments, as do fruit woods. Thea subtly- new method, for up to that time the English had used
coloured finishing techniques of the 17th century yetseem
another method of making an arched front, which
to have influenced the choice of the pale maplewas over its five strips of wood. The centre strip was bent
to use
naturally coloured rivals. In these instruments, downwhat
at the ends, a piece was then put on either side at
we now consider the normal method was used, of an angle, and the last pieces stuck on the edges at the
carving the front out of a thick plank made in two lower level of the ribs. The whole was then shaped and
pieces. A century later in England this was considered smoothed, the centre bouts cutting right across the

533

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outer pieces, making in the end seven pieces to the
belly. It was probably made over a mould like the
arched back of a guitar. The Ciciliano viols can be seen
in retrospect to be very advanced. The neck is sloped
back a little for the comfort of playing (it does not in
this case increase the bridge height as did the sloping
of the neck of the French viols a century later). They
are lightly built in comparison with some of their
contemporaries; the front is hardly more than 3 mm
and, being without any bass bar, only supports the
bridge by its high arching. The whole instrument is a
thin, very resonant structure without any supporting
or stiffening bars at all, even on the back. (Giovanni
Maria and John Rose were among other makers who
seem to have made viols without back struts.) The
fingerboard is hollowed, not only at the thick end
where some weight can be saved, but right to the nut,
where no appreciable saving of weight is achieved by
what can be removed.

I speak of these viols as advanced, because some-

what later in the same area the Venetian viols already
described show a very conservative approach to
bearing the weight of the bridge. Not only is the belly
construction more 'primitive', but the belly is con-
siderably thicker. The hook bar, which perhaps was
first used on this type of viol, sticks out an inch and a
half or more from the belly, raising the tailpiece and so
reducing the angle of distortion of the strings over the
bridge, which had to be quite high because of the great
width of the instrument.

At Brussels are a set of about twenty viols also made

4. Viol by Batista Ciciliano, mid- 16th century, Brussels Conservatoire
near Venice by Zenatto of Treviso, but a century later,
Museum
in 1683 and 1684. It has been thought that they are re-
furbished 16th-century instruments, for Vincenzo
Corro, from whose collection they came, was an
antiquarian collecting both instruments and music. Hements been north European. But the violin had
was an official of the Venetian church and had under eclipsed the viol much earlier in the century in Italy,
his care a music school for orphaned girls, some of and this minor revival of the viol could only take it up
whose names are scratched on the varnish of the where it had been dropped, as an 'old-fashioned'
consort instrument. Being so good at violins, it seems
instruments. The crudity of their workmanship, their
guitar shape and straight-set necks are giventhat as Italy didn't need to develop the viol as a virtuoso
instrument, as was done in France and northern
evidence of their earlier origin. However, Laurence
Witten in his article on the origin of the violin,2 gives
Europe during the first part of the 17th century.
These changes were made by the French to fit the
evidence of the revival of the guitar-shaped viol in Italy
at this time, and Stradivari's note-books show plansinstrument
of for solo use, and were mainly made for the
such instruments. Cheap instruments intended for comfort
the of the musicians when playing rapid music.
students at an orphanage would not have been well The neck was sloped back a little, jutting out the heel
finished. The straight-set necks and such internal over the front, and was thinned near the heel for
features as the absence of any provision for sound- greater ease of movement. Also, the system of bass bar
and soundpost was introduced, the latter making the
posts and very slight bass bars carved out of the belly
response of the strings more even and giving it more
would strongly suggest an earlier date, had the instru-
535

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projection. The French called it 'the soul' of the instru-
ment, but then they had invented the style.
A large viol, supposedly by Jaye and dated 1619, in
the possession of William Hill and Sons, illustrates
some of the alterations being made to the viol in
England at that time. It also illustrates some of the
problems of interpreting the condition of instruments
so long after the work was done.
The body of this viol is large and deep, about
711 cm long and 15 cm deep, and the neck is longer
than we are used to now, giving a string length of 74 or
even 76 cm. This long neck and considerable string
length were very much a feature of early viols and even
referred to by the French later in the century as a
peculiarity of English viols.
The neck of this instrument is of course original,
and has suffered only slight modification in the form
of thinning, which has been taken close to the end of
the nails in the heel and has exposed rust stains which
usually surround them. The nails are still in place, and
it seems very unlikely that the neck had been removed.
The neck angle is very low, giving a bridge height of
about 7 cm. Internally, the instrument has linen
linings, a wooden centre strip which is a restorer's con-
tribution, two back bars which are again replace-
ments or even additions, wooden corner blocks, again
possibly additions, but most important, it has a back-
plate for a soundpost which is not modern. This back-
plate sits slightly lower down the body than on a
modern viol, suggesting a position of the bridge well
down the soundholes. This backplate is fairly slight,
and has one curious feature. Although made of one
piece of spruce, it is cut across in six places and strips
of what may be sycamore inserted in these same cuts. It
may be that by driving these strips of wood into the
cuts the plate is given a slight inwards bend to counter-
act the pressure of the post. It certainly does this in
practice.
The problem one is faced with is to try to decide
whether the backplate was original or the con-
tribution of a baroque improver. The bass bar gives no
clue (it is a modern replacement), nor do the linings
which are undisturbed at that place. The French were
using a soundpost by 1636, since it was mentioned by
Mersenne as a normal piece of equipment in a viol,
but John Rose, who made viols until the turn of the
century, did not seem to have had any use for them.
The only ones appearing in his instruments are
modern, and one instrument survives which never had
one. So it would seem possible that this instrument,
the early work of an important maker, would have
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been equipped with the new acoustical devices. It is,
however, possible that it was put in twenty or thirty
years later.
Apart from these internal features, the instrument
shows the growing influence of the French style. The
whole instrument is large (overwound strings had not
yet brought the size of the viol down), and the neck was
clumsy and the pegbox deep and decorated in a very
English style, but the tailpiece and the hookbar are
very delicate and obviously inspired by the French.
The hookbar is of ebony and fixed with two ebony
pegs. It again raises the tailpiece nearly an inch off the
belly, allowing more height in the bridge for bow
clearance but reducing, the angle of distortion of the
strings over it, so keeping down the pressure. Perhaps
this was the original use of the hookbar, for the device
first occurs on wide instruments and was by no means
universal, even at the end of the 17th century.
By this time, instruments such as those by Barak
Norman were thoroughly Frenchified. The now
familiar system of soundpost and bass bar was univer-
sally established; even the form and sizes of the instru-
ment had been far more standardized in northern
Europe with the help of overwound strings. This tech-
nical advance not only allowed the bass instrument to
be brought down in size, but helped to create a
workable treble, for the illustrations of the early 17th
century show few trebles and even the Zenatto viols,
which come in all sizes including a very great bass,
have nothing smaller, than a small tenor. There is in
fact only one 16th-century treble surviving, by
Giovanni Maria at Oxford, and it seems suspiciously
unworkable.
These late 17th-century English viols are the basis of
the majority of modern viol making, since they were
the basis of Dolmetsch's work, but apart from internal
strengthening and thickening of the instruments, they
have been modified in a way which is very easy to
compare with illustrations of the originals, and makes
a great deal of difference to the whole nature of the
instrument. The neck has been put back at a greater
angle, which results in a higher bridge and a greater
bridge pressure, and whereas pictures of pre-19th-
century bowed instruments usually show bridges wider
than they are high, most modern bridges are higher
than they are wide.
The variety of form, structure and approach in
surviving viols was a great surprise to me and is, I
hope, a surprise to you, for it must represent only a
part of a far greater variety of craftsmanship, glimpsed
through illustrations. Very few instruments indeed
537
 survive from that time unaltered, and piecing together
the rest of the jigsaw is a long and difficult task. The
alteration and restoration of the majority was quite as Virginia Pleasants
radical as that suffered by the harpsichord, and was fortepiano
often undertaken by violin makers who have only one
concept of bowed instrument sound.
This standardization by restoration has seriously
distorted our view of the instrument. For this view to
change, the philosophy of modern violin making must C.P.E. BACH
be separated from it, for it still exerts a considerable
influence over much viol making, tending to confront
irresistible forces with immoveable objects. Like
Victorian architecture, it looks like the real thing but is
all held up with bits of iron hidden in the mullions.
But, as Howard Mayer Brown writes, 'Viol makers are
starting to do what harpsichord makers did some time
ago and press for a more careful and discriminating
appreciation of the distinct qualities of an instrument
of a particular period'.3 I would only add to that-and
Sechs Sonaten mit verinderten
place.
We have had for several years the 'renaissance' viol. Reprisen 1760
I hope it won't suffer the same standardization as the
PURCELL ROOM
baroque instrument. The instruments of the past con-
formed outwardly to certain styles and regional
19JANUARY 1979 7.30 pm
patterns, but the means by which these were achieved
were intensely personal, and were made with a very
sensitive intuition of the balance of forces within the
instrument, forever mindful to allow it to respond and
sing with all the freedom and grace possible to a Technical/Interpretative classes
wooden box with strings stretched over it.
in
1 Max Muller, 'Kaspar Tieffenbrucker', Violins and Violinists, Mar-
April, 1958.

VIOLS :LUTE
2 Laurence C. Witten, II, 'Apollo, Orpheus and David',Journal ofthe
American Musical Instruments Society, I ( 1975), pp. 5-55.
3 EM 6/1 (Jan 1978).

Corrections and additions RECORDER

July 19 77: The reproduction of Gaddi's Betrothal of the Virgin (p. 333)
is by courtesy of The Mansell Collection.

January 1978: The photo of Lucy Robinson (p. 6) is by Denis

Waugh.
Evening Classes-?9.00 for the year
The viola da gamba solo from the St John Passion is reproduced by
Small group instruction
permission of the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek, East Berlin (p. 9).
April 1978: The woodcut of a choir practice is from Gunther Zainer,
Spiegel des menschlichen Lebens, Augsburg c 1475 (British Library).
On p. 309 for 'Ocnier' read 'Orchier' (col. 2, 1.6)
July 1978: On pp. 363, 371, 391, 393, 397: delete MS in each case. Details:
On p. 377, the British Library copy of A Choice Collection is
shelf-mark K.i.c.,5. School of Adult & Social Studies
In Don L. Smithers' 'The baroque trumpet after 1721-2' (p. 359)
se place' should appear in the title of the Bach music example asGoldsmiths' College, Lewisham Way,
'Tromiba se piace' not in the line below. The zugtrompete illustrated New Cross, London SE14 6NW
at the foot of the page is from Naumburg not Nuremberg.
continued on p. 581

539

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