Violin history to 1600 - Disemination

Violin History and repertory to 1600

Dissemination

Italy

Little is known about how the violin consort spread outside the Este-Gonzaga circle, for there are few reliable references to it prior to the second quarter of the 16th century, by which time it was widely distributed both sides of the Alps. Northern Italy, repeatedly invaded and fought over by French and imperial armies at the time, was not a promising environment for the creation and survival of documents, and, according to Jambe de Fer, ‘few persons are found who make use of it [the violin] other than those who, by their labour on it, make their living’; it was not played by the literate classes, who might have discussed it in correspondence or literature. We also have no means of knowing whether some of the many unqualified references to viole – such as the ‘quattro suonatori di liuto, viole e altri strumenti’ who appeared in a Bolognese triumphal car in 1512, or the viole heard in a play during the Roman carnival of 1519 – were to violins rather than viols.

The French language is less ambiguous in this respect, since the terms viole and violon seem to have been used consistently to distinguish between the viol and violin from the beginning. It is not surprising, therefore, that the largest body of unambiguous early references to the violin is in the French-language accounts of the dukes of Savoy, who ruled Savoy and Piedmont from Turin. There was a payment to a group of ‘vyollons’ from Vercelli as early as 1523, and dozens of professional groups across northern Italy were evidently using violins by the 1540s and 50s, often in small towns such as Abbiategrasso, Desenzano, Rovereto and Peschiera. A large town such as Milan might support several groups: one day in December 1544 four violinists entertained the Duke of Savoy during the day, and four others in the evening. In general, the Savoy accounts give the impression that by then the violin consort was the most popular choice of professional groups – wind instruments are rarely mentioned – and was being used by quite humble classes of musician.

The violin spread with remarkable rapidity during the first half of the 16th century, in part because it was often cultivated by independent, mobile family groups, who recruited their own personnel, composed or arranged their own music, often made their own instruments, and were prepared to travel great distances to work for the right patron. The largest courts employed enough musicians to allow groups to specialize in particular instruments, though most groups had to be versatile: the six-man Brescian group which Vincenzo Parabosco recommended to the Farnese court in January 1546 played viole da brazo as well as seven types of wind instrument. The normal practice of the time was to use the various instrumental families as alternatives on a musical menu rather than ingredients in a single dish, choosing them according to circumstances: violins were suitable for dancing, viols for serious contrapuntal music and for accompanying the voice, loud wind instruments for playing outdoors, and so on. However, mixed ensembles became more and more common in the second half of the 16th century: Parabosco particularly recommended ‘the combinations of these instruments, one type with another, and combined in various ways with vocal music’ because it was ‘something unusual and so new’.

France and England

A Parisian woodcut dating from 1516 shows that consorts of bowed instruments were known in France in the second decade of the century, however unlikely the situation (the players are Plato, Aristotle, Galen and Hippocrates) and fanciful the details (fig.8). A six-man group described variously as ‘viollons, haulxboys et sacquebuteurs’ and ‘violons de la bande françoise’ was already established at the French court by 1529. The musicians all have French names, so they may have come into contact with the violin while accompanying the French court on its forays south of the Alps. But several groups of Italian violinists served in Paris during the 1530s and 40s, and in about 1555 a violin consort led by Balthasar de Beaujoyeux is said to have arrived there from the Milan area.

It is not clear when an orchestral violin band was established at the French court, for a number of received ‘facts’ seem to be no more than hearsay. For instance, the idea that Andrea Amati made a complete set of 38 instruments for Charles IX (reigned 1560–74) seems only to go back to a statement in Jean-Benjamin de La Borde's Essai sur la musique ancienne et moderne (1780/R), and Moens (B1998) has recently challenged the authenticity of the surviving instruments decorated with devices relating to Charles IX (see §V below). In any case, they include small- as well as large-pattern violins, which were probably made for different pitch standards and are unlikely to have been played together in a single band. However, legal agreements between members of the Paris musicians’ guild, the Confrérie de St Julien-des-Ménétriers, show that groups of orchestral size were formed in the middle of the 16th century – there are instances of nine players in 1547, eight in 1551 and 11 in 1552 – and violins are always given as one of the options, usually as an alternative to cornetts, when particular instruments begin to be mentioned in the 1580s.

The violin was apparently brought to England by a group of six Jewish string players from Milan, Brescia and Venice that arrived at Henry VIII's court in the spring in 1540; the institution they founded served successive monarchs up to the beginning of the Civil War in 1642, and during the Restoration it formed the basis of the 24 Violins (see London, fig.11). Surviving documents suggest that violins began to appear in English aristocratic households in the 1560s, and began to be taken up by town waits, theatre groups and the more humble classes of musician around 1600. Most violins played in 16th-century England were probably imported or made by the instrumentalists themselves. Members of the Lupo family, who served in the court violin consort between 1540 and 1642, are known to have made instruments, though the earliest English violin maker so far identified is the Cambridge University wait Benet Pryme: an inventory drawn up at his death in 1557 includes ‘vii vyalles & vyolans’ valued at £3, as well as ‘a nest of unp[er]fyte vyall[e]s’ and ‘unp[er]fytt regall[e]s & oth[e]r lu[m]ber’ – evidently the contents of a workshop.

(c) Germany and Poland.

The same pattern was repeated in German-speaking areas of Europe. The violin consort at Munich was founded by four members of the ‘Bisutzi’ family in the 1550s, and was enlarged around 1568, probably for Duke Wilhelm's marriage with Renata of Lorraine (see Munich, fig.1). The five newcomers, who included three members of the Morari family, may have been part of Renée's entourage; the court at Nancy acquired a set of violins as early as 1534. Italian violinists (including three members of the Ardesi family from Cremona) were at the Viennese court by the 1560s, at Weimar in 1569, at Innsbruck in the 1570s and 80s, and at Hechingen in the Black Forest from 1581. Italian instruments mentioned in inventories include a set of Brescian ‘geig’ at Augsburg (1566), ‘Ein Italinisch Stimwerckh von Geigen, darinn ein discant, drey tenor und ein Bass’ at Baden-Baden (1582), and ‘Funf venedische geugen’ at Hechingen (1609).

The use of the term ‘Geige’ presents another thorny terminological problem. Around 1400 it seems to have been used in opposition to Vedel to distinguish the rebec from the medieval fiddle, just as it was used around 1600 in opposition to Phyolen or Violen to distinguish violins from viols. Early 16th-century German writers such as Sebastian Virdung (1511), Hans Gerle (1532) and Martin Agricola (1529, 5/1545) used the term Geigen for both instruments, qualifying it with grossen and kleinen as in Italian terminology of the period. These treatises illustrate kleinen Geigen with instruments shaped like rebecs, so it is not clear when the term began to be used for the violin. In 1545 Agricola described a third type, the ‘Polischen Geigen’; there are no illustrations but the instrument was apparently played without frets, using fingernails to stop the strings. It had three strings; there was also a four-string bass version. Several violin makers, including Mateusz Dobrucki, BartÅ‚omiej Kiejcher and Marcin Groblicz the elder, are known to have been active in 16th-century Poland, and some apparently 16th-century Polish violins survive, often with non-classic shapes, though not enough research has been done into them (or contemporary German instrument making for that matter) for us to be sure at present what relationship they had with Italian violin-making traditions.

By 1600 the violin consort must have been one of the most familiar sounds in the courts and towns of northern Europe (fig.9). But in the northern Italian courts, its cradle, it seems to have been in decline. Regular violin consorts do not seem to have been employed at the Mantuan and Ferrarese courts in the late 16th century – Mantua hired violini from Parma and Casalmaggiore in 1588, presumably because it had no group of its own – and in 1608 the Florentine court recruited 12 violinists from France. Vincenzo Giustiniani wrote in about 1629 that consorts made up of a single type of instrument, ‘with the uniformity of sound and of the consonances, became tiresome rather quickly and were an incentive to sleep rather than to pass the time on a hot afternoon’. He associated shawms and ‘bands of violins’ with unfashionable milieus such as ‘festivals in small towns and country districts, and also in the great cities at the festivals of the common people’. As discussed below, the fashion in advanced musical circles in Italy was for mixed ensembles, in which the violin was often used without the other members of its family. The lead in the development of violin consorts passed to northern Europe, and it was more than half a century before Italy recovered it.