16th century ensemble viol music

16th Century Ensemble Viol MusicAuthor(s): Michael MorrowSource: Early Music, Vol. 2, No. 3 (Jul., 1974), pp. 160-163Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3125560 .

Accessed: 08/12/2014 12:01

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Oxford University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Early Music.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Mon, 8 Dec 2014 12:01:47 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=oup

http://www.jstor.org/stable/3125560?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


16th century ensemble

viol music

MICHAEL MORROW

~I o

a

"rJ

Viol music written in tablature was common in England during the greater part of the 17th century. This music was designed for the lyra viol, the English equivalent of the multi-stringed Italian lyra da gamba. The term lyra viol applies not, as may be supposed, to a type of instrument but to a style of playing in which a simplified lute left-hand technique of double-stops and chords was applied to a small bass, a normal

tenor, or a treble viol. This was used principally for solo music, although one finds pieces for two or more

lyras (or viols played lyra-way) as well as an occasional.

piece for one or two lyras with other viols playing melodic lines written in staff notation.

There is, however, another, earlier, style of viol tablature in which music for an ensemble of, say, four or five viols was written in tablature instead of notation. Here the use of tablature indicates not a musical style, but a notational convenience, a sub- stitute for mensural notation. It is this and its con-

sequent stylistic implications that I wish to discuss. Music for viol ensembles in tablature rather than

mensural notation is found in three sources from the first half of the 16th century: one manuscript collection and two printed instruction books, all German. The earliest is the manuscript in Munich University Library (40 Cod. ms. 718) known as Mathematik und Tabulaturbuch des Jorg Weltzell. The first part of this

manuscript deals with mathematics. The remainder, dated 1523 and 1524, is a casual collection of viol

parts headed Dzscantus, Altus, Tenor, Bassus, and Vagant, and written in what is generally known as German lute tablature. This section of the manuscript also includes brief rules for mensural notation and tablature,

diagrams giving tunings for viols and lutes, recipes for ink and varnish and, at the end, five pieces for solo lute. The viol music, a representative collection of familiar German song-settings by such composers as Paul Hofhaimer and Ludwig Senfl, also includes two Hoftanze ('Schwartzknab' and another, unknown to me) and, predictably, 'Fortuna desperata'. Many pieces lack one or more parts. Despite the few pages on notation and tablature, this is clearly a player's anthology, intended for performance rather than for

any didactic purpose; the rules are for learning, not teaching.

The two printed books are both by Hans Gerle: Musica Teusch (1532) and Musica und Tabulatur (1546). As the latter is essentially a revised and expanded version of the 1532 edition it will be simpler here to consider them together. Both are substantial and informative works designed to instruct the musical amateur in the rudiments of viol, rebec and lute

160



.. . . . . . .. ..

- - -

ii u r

Herr Christ der eynig Gott'from MusicaTeusch (1532)

40 4

or T F1 IITr 7flTT ' ffr I i• b - I b Kb+4 # *4* 0b 04

? -• 4, t?0

ASt 5 --00#lw ?- 4tbt 1

71

"- - _7•?+• •• -''-::.>"?••.::

• :+.. "i:• '" •

..,A A

mii.... .. ... ..

," -/ :"9:,

'Magich hertzlieb erwerben dich' from Musica Teusch (1532)

161



i

'I j/

?Ar-

LA

Tllk

THE

DIVISIO N-V IOL, or The Art of Playing Ex tempore

upon a Ground

by CHRISTOPHER SIMPSON

A LITHOGRAPHIC FACSIMILE

OF THE SECOND EDITION

1667 De Luxe Edition k8

J. CURWEN & SONS LTD FABER MUSIC LTD., 38 RUSSELL SQUARE,

LONDON

playing, explaining in addition the tablature used for these instruments (German 'lute' tablature) as well as what little Gerle deemed it necessary for the reader to know of mensural notation. It may be worth noting that Gerle, like other early German writers of instrumental instruction books, teaches music through the medium of tablature, rather than notation. Indeed, one writer, Martin Agricola, after ridiculing the com-

plexities of German lute tablature, proposes an alter- native which, he maintains, will be useful for many melody as well as harmony instruments: not mensural notation as one might expect, but German keyboard tablature, a system only less cumbersome than- German lute tablature by a matter of some degrees.

As well as quite detailed instruction in technique and style, both books by Gerle present the reader (or as one 16th-century German book puts it, 'the buyer') with a generous amount of music: pieces for four viols, four rebecs, and lute solos. All these use one tablature system, and each edition contains two pieces for viols in which, for comparison and study, the music is given in mensural notation with the tablature

printed below. That the surviving tablatures for viol ensemble are

all German is, I believe, only one of several similar accidents of musical history. It is regrettable but

hardly surprising that all but one manuscript of viol tablature appear to have perished (how many manu-

script sources remain of music for lyra da braccio, for vihuela?). As virtually all 16th-century printed music for instrumental ensemble was designed for the convenience of all possible manner of instruments - even of singers, as the title pages attest - it would indeed have been foolhardy for any publisher to have

produced viol music in tablature outside the pages of an instruction book.

The viol came to Germany from Italy about the end of the 15th century. Its transalpine provenance is confirmed by its German name, welsche geige ('Italian fiddle'), and it would seem probable that the use of viol tablature was brought from Italy at the same time. Silvestro Ganassi, in his treatise on viol playing (two parts, 1542 and 1543), gives his musical examples in Italian 'lute' tablature and the ricercars for solo viol either in mensural notation, tablature, or both. He appears to have taken tablature for granted -

and he was not the man to let slip an opportunity of drawing the reader's attention to any innovation of his own.

Tablature for bowed and plucked instruments was, to begin with, designed to aid the musically illiterate minstrel at a time when the guild traditions of un-

162



notated solo and ensemble playing were coming to be

regarded as socially rather low, as well as incon- venient. In England as late as the 1570s - admittedly on the wrong side of the cultural dateline--the musician Thomas Whitehorne refers with contempt to those who have 'learned a little to sing pricksong or else have learned by hand or by ear or else by tablature'. Tablature for the plucked instruments -

lute, cittern, and guitar - however, was established in

England about some forty years earlier. And, of course, lute tablature had been regarded as

thoroughly respectable in Italy from the early years of the century.

As both the lute and the viol share the same relative

tuning, one tablature system serves for both, and it

might be worth considering whether one should think of this solely as lute tablature. For example, although Hans Judenkunig describes his 1523 book as being 'a

simple way to understand the correct method for the lute and the viol', the work contains tablature for the lute alone.

While mensural notation shows the pitch and duration of a note, lute and viol tablatures show in addition the exact string and fret to be stopped. It is

interesting to observe that in Gerle's book there is a distinct difference in the application of musicaficta in the French chansons and the German Tenorlieder: the former, as one might expect, are sprinkled with accidentals; the latter conservative to a degree, with, in

pieces a minor tonality, minor thirds in the final chord and flat leading notes being common. These German characteristics are clearly defined in the preface to a collection of 'foreign' dances published in Breslau in 1555. The compilers (town bandsmen) remark that

they have carefully printed the 'little crosses' (i.e.

sharps and naturals) as these are not normally found in 'our' (German/Polish) music.

One of the most stylistically important facts to be found in the Gerle books concerns the choice of viols for a four-part piece. Today it is accepted practice for a viol quartet faced with a Parisian chanson or a Tenorlied by Senfl to perform the works on a treblein D, two tenors in G, and a bass in D. Consequently,' if the original is notated in soprano, alto, tenor, and bass clefs, all four instruments will produce a melliflu- ous sound around their middle strings, a sound rather like a well-bred harmonium.

Gerle, however, states categorically that the normal four-part viol ensemble consists of a tenor in A, two basses in D, and a contrabass in A (the latter, however, lacking the bottom A string). He recommends the modern D G G D ensemble only if the top part goes

above d" (the fifth fret on the top string of an A tenor), the clefs then being high ones, with the bass part notated in the tenor -clef. The high viols would con-

sequently be playing on the same frets and strings as the low set had done. This is also confirmed by the Munich manuscript. Thus, the instruments are playing virtually all the time on their upper two strings, with the occasional exception of the bass. The Discantus and Altus habitually play as high as the fifth - or even the seventh - fret on the top string.

This being so, I think that even lacking properly constructed renaissance instruments, it should be possible to say with some certainty that the characteristic sound of the early 16th-century viol would have been

crisper, brighter, with possibly more of a rebec-like

clarity of articulation than the baroque or quasi- baroque instrument we are accustomed to hear today.

That all this was not merely a 16th-century German aberration is confirmed by Ganassi who mentions the same principles: the A D D A tuning and low instruments playing high on their top strings.

Today woodwind players are gradually coming to realise that a renaissance recorder, for instance, is

quite a different instrument from a baroque one and that most modern recorders bear little resemblance to either, and they are beginning to insist on honest re-

productions. They may even, in time, be prepared to consider the techniques appropriate to the instruments.

Most modern viol players, on the other hand, are all too cheerfully complacent. All they ask for is an all-

purpose viol, an all-purpose technique, and an

all-purpose style. This style is founded on what they've been told about certain late 17th- and 18th-century treatises, and this has been greatly diluted to produce a 'musical' legato, i.e. a glutinous lack of articulation having its origins in the technical limitations of the earlier modern amateurs of the viol.

This article began as notes for the musical insert that appears in this issue, but has grown into what I would like to consider as a preliminary shot or two fired in the interests of historical and musical reality. I trust that viol players will find something heartening in these notes: it is always stimulating when a false superstructure shows signs of crumbling, revealing some traces of original foundations. My thanks are due to Miss Colette Harris for allowing me to read her translation of Ganassi's work.

163



16th century ensemble viol music

Documents