As the culmination of years of research, I have published the first two academic articles based on my research for this project. The first, published in Early Music History, argues the following:
Abstract
In sixteenth-century France, the viol emerged as a symbol of cultural refinement enjoyed by men of virtue and as a tool to shape bourgeois leisure to reflect noble ideals of a moral and virtuous life. Viols appeared at the French court alongside the transalpine migration of artists, artisans and musicians, the acquisition of prized Italian string instruments and the recruitment of the luthier Gaspar Duiffoprugcar, master of the latest innovations in Italian instrument building. Learning to play viol and lute became essential for the education of nobles because of the belief that they could elevate the soul through the emulation of the ratios present in musica mundana. Philibert Jambe de Fer, in one of the first French music treatises, affirms that by the middle of the century viols were played by both the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie when he claims it is ‘an instrument with which gentlemen, merchants and other men of virtue pass their time’. For the bourgeoisie – the targeted readership of the earliest published tutors – luthiers, musicians and religious reformers founded music schools to teach lute and viol under a moral philosophy aimed at limiting the idle time of urban youths through humanistic and religious curricula.
The second, in a special issue of the Journal of the Viola da Gamba Society of America, argues the following:
Abstract
In the historiography of the viol, five-string French Renaissance viols tuned in fourths have been described as an anomaly that became obsolete by the seventeenth century. Because of the lack of extant instruments, their construction and uses have remained elusive. By the middle of the sixteenth century, bourgeois amateur musicians embraced playing the viol as a means to emulate the manners and mores of the nobility. As evidenced by the publication of tutors for the instrument and the intabulation of chansons, playing the viol afforded amateur musicians opportunities for intimate social interaction. Tutors, treatises, and iconography combine to paint a picture of French viols with long necks, bridges placed below the sound holes, outwardly turned corners, and strung with thick gut strings. These characteristics, most clearly articulated by Jean Rousseau in his Traité de la viole, resonate with surviving sixteenth-century viols from Northern Italy and with visual depictions in contemporary iconography. Because evidence from Pierre Trichet suggests that the low consort of five-string viols persisted in the provinces well into the seventeenth century, a reappraisal of potential repertoires can expand to include more than one hundred fantasies that survive from the late sixteenth through the first half of the seventeenth century. In showing that Renaissance viols were still being played after the death of Jacques Mauduit in 1627, we can reimagine the sound world of amateur musicians in the provinces where every innovation that the court and Parisian elites eagerly embraced was not instantly incorporated into their quotidian musical life.
Both are available as open-access resources and are accessible using the following links:
“An Instrument ‘with which gentlemen, merchants, and other men of virtue pass their time’: The Viola da Gamba in Sixteenth-Century France” Early Music History 42 (2023): 235–275. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261127924000056
“The Long Death of French Renaissance Viols” Journal of the Viola da Gamba Society of America 52 (2021–2024): 80–109. https://www.vdgsa.org/_files/ugd/d4b545_b8e9fe1590f7427db872af8f10445c8d.pdf
