RESEARCH REPORT: DOUBLE BASS
SESSION AT THE IMS CONFERENCE IN
LEUVEN, BELGIUM
Marc Vanscheeuwijck
During
the first week of August 2002, the Catholic University of Leuven
organized and hosted the seventeenth Congress of the International
Musicological Society. The conference was an organizational tour de
force: not only was it spread over six full days, but more than seven
hundred papers were read in an extremely wide variety of sessions
dealing with virtually all current topics in musicology. One of the
many afternoon sessions on Monday 5 August was entitled "Rex tremendae maiestatis:
The Double Bass and Its Adoption as a Standard Ensemble Member at
European Courts," organized by Xose Crisanto Gandara and chaired by
Julie Ann Sadie. Originally, six papers were to be presented in this
session, but unfortunately three people were forced to cancel their
participation in the conference. Instead of presenting some of the
latest developments in scholarship concerning large string bass
instruments in Spain, the British Isles, Germanic regions, France, and
Italy, the session was sadly limited to France and Italy. This did not,
however, prevent the participants and the audience alike from engaging
in lively discussions.
Joëlle Morton's paper "Bass Matters: So Really, What is a
Violone? Some Answers, and More Questions" would have been an ideal
session opener: she first reminded the audience of some of the most
important issues in the recent scholarly discussions about violoni and
double basses in general, and offered insights on their use, playing
technique, and organology. Although she spoke sec-ond, I will summarize
her comments first because of their intro-ductory qualities. After
pointing out that the generalized use of the term "violone" today
designates large string bass instruments of the viola da gamba and
violin families, Morton first observed that the physical differences
and distinctions in playing technique between the two instrument
families offered greater differences in sound, projection, and response
than is usually acknowledged. Moreover there was a large variety in
shape of these low instruments, even just within the gamba family.
Consequently, in assigning names to these various instruments, the term
"violone" is too vague. Morton then proposed to classify such
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century instruments first according to the
family they belong to, and second according to their tuning. The term
"violone" should thus be used for the larger representatives of the
viola da gamba family only, and it should be further specified as G, A
or D violone according to the tuning of its outer strings. On the other
hand, the term "contrabass" should be used to indicate large
violin-shaped instruments with three or four strings tuned in fourths
or in fifths.
She then showed that the G (or A) violone was the first
pre-ferred basso continuo instrument: its use was extremely common up
to the 1730s, and is attested especially in Germanic sources. However,
during most of the seventeenth century it was mainly played at written
pitch and did not double the bass at the lower octave. Until the 1660s,
when wound strings were introduced, and when the violoncello became
more common, the G violone seems to have been the most "normal" bass
instrument. I found quite interesting Morton's hypothesis that with the
diffusion of such silver-wound gut strings in the early eighteenth
century, the G violone began to be used as an instrument doubling the
bass line an octave lower than the cello. The use of large D violoni as
transposing basses was very limited, and particularly so compared to
what modem practice would imply. In contrast, the "Viennese" type of
violone with its mixed Terz-Quart Stimmung and underhand bow
grip became so popular that composers such as Haydn even wrote a
concerto for it. Finally, Morton states that the demise of large
members of the gamba family coincided with the decline in use of the
baryton and the viola d'amore in the early nineteenth century.
On the other end of the spectrum were the violin-shaped
basses, the earliest descriptions and tunings of which appeared in the
beginning of the seventeenth century (Praetorius, Mersenne). Only later
in the century did Bartolomeo Bismantova provide a really convincing
description of a bass with four strings tuned in fourths. Again,
opinions were divided on the function of such an instrument: Janowka
and de Brossard claim that it played an octave below written pitch, but
the French author only advocates its use in large choruses because of
its "charming effect." Even as late as 1781 Corrette still tells his
readers to make limited use of the double bass, and to simplify the
bass line.
In sum, Morton first reiterated that although both small and
larger bass instruments of the Baroque and Classical eras had limited
extension into the subbass register, this fact was not considered an
issue until the nineteenth century. Second, the G violone was the most
common of all violoni, and finally, all these instruments used a fairly
low tension for the strings, which provided a limited sound projection.
She concluded by encouraging further investigation in particular into
the introduction of sixteen-foot double basses as regular members in
the various types of ensembles.
The discussion following Morton's well-illustrated PowerPoint
presentation touched upon, among other topics, the problem of hybrid
bass instruments so common in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
iconography, and upon the difficulty in deciding what particular
"family" some instruments belong to and whether this is even a relevant
question.
The first paper in the session, "The Introduction of the
Double Bass to the French Court," was delivered by Michael Greenberg
and was an in-depth assessment of various types of archival, musical,
and literary documents. He opened by posing the problem of how to
define the double bass: is it an instrument capable of extending into
the sixteen-foot register? an instrument played standing? an instrument
that doubles the bass line an octave below, as we often assume today?
Greenberg quickly dismissed the use of such "double basses" before the
eighteenth century in France. Although Mersenne (1636) mentions a sixth
member of the violin family a fifth lower a la facon de Lorraine
(tuned Eb'-Bb'-F-c), it is impossible to find any evidence of its use
in the Grande Bande des Violons, or in Muffat's testimony. The absence
of such an instrument even in large ensembles is further corroborated
by several sources of the l660s and 1670s suggesting that only one type
of basse de violon was in use in France. Although the almanachs containing the names of the musicians in the Chapelle Royale in Versailles (beginning in 1692) refer to an instrument as a grosse basse
- a term used in Marais's Alcyone of 1706 in reference to a
sixteen-foot double bass - Greenberg does not believe the 1692 term
denotes a sixteen-foot doubling instrument. Clues from Raguenet (1697)
and the absence of a double bass in Sauveur's 1701 Principes d'acoustique et de musique seem to support this idea. Greenberg further hypothesizes that this grosse basse was probably just a different size of basse de violon.
In this case Greenberg uses iconography and surviving instruments to
support his theory: in various paintings by Puget, Coysevoix, and
Horemans, a large-bodied, five-string instrument with a short neck
appears, comparable to the Krouchdaler instrument of the Brussels
Instrumentenmuseum. This instrument and the regular four-string basse de violon evidently coexisted at the court of Louis XIV: in 1714 Jean-Baptiste Matho specified "four 4-string basses de violon" and "four 5-string basses de violon" in the score of his opera Arion. However, in rehearsing the piece in the Paris Opera, he reassigned the five-string basse de violon
parts to the four-string basses, and the bassoon parts to even lower
bass instruments. He apparently did not know the term for these large
basses, so he referred to them as "basses de viollons a l'octave,"
which are obviously double basses, since Michel Pignolet de Monteclair
- credited with introducing the double bass into the Paris Opera - was
specifically mentioned as having played the part. Using engravings by
Martin Engelbrecht, Greenberg further suggested that the difference
between the grosse basse and basse de violon in the 1692 almanachs
might not even have been one of size, but only of number of strings. In
any case, the earliest conclusive evidence concerning the use of a
sixteen-foot double bass at the French court was in 1747, during the
reign of Louis XV.
In the second section of his paper, Greenberg reviewed in detail some accounts relative to the use of basses de violons and double basses in the Opera, first in documents relative to Monteclair, and also in the scoring of various operas by Jean Theobaldo di Gatti (Scylla, 1701), Andre Campra (Tancrède, 1702), and Marin Marais (Alcyone,
1706). Finally, he presented evidence pro (Rameau) and con (Corrette)
regarding the constant use of the double bass in the orchestra.
Monteclair's successors, who are known to have played the double bass
exclusively, seem to have used it constantly in ouvertures, choruses,
and some dances beginning in 1738. Three years later, the Italian
violoncello began to supplant the French basse de violon,
which led Greenberg to believe that the double bass may have started to
be used constantly precisely to compensate for the loss of sonority
occasioned by the substitution of the smaller cellos for the basses de violon.
In his closing remarks, Greenberg reiterated the question of
when exactly the sixteen-foot tuning first appeared at the French
court: while it is first documented in 1636, there is no evidence for
its use. Was it introduced in 1692, depending on one's interpretation
of the term grosse basse? 1747 is certainly the year in which
the first conclusive documentary evidence is found. At the Opera, on
the other hand, the double bass may have been introduced as early as
1701, and definitely by 1706. Although it was first used as a curiosity
for special effects, it gradually became a more integral member of the
continuo group by 1737. Rameau was probably exceptional in assigning a
separate part to the double bass in Les Boreades (rehearsed
in 1763, but never performed), but approximately sixty years after its
introduction in the Opera, the double bass had become a regular member
of French orchestras.
After a short question-and-answer session, Julie Ann Sadie,
chair of the session, introduced Marc Vanscheeuwijck for the third and
final paper of the afternoon, entitled "The Uses of the Violone in
Seventeenth-Century Italy." After a brief overview of recent
scholarship on the various possible definitions of violone in Italy (by
Bonta, Schmid, Morton, and Myers), I presented a few excerpts from
Ganassi's Regola Rubertina and Lettione Seconda to show that in the sixteenth century in contrabasso referred to pitches below the Gamma ut (G), and that the terms basso and contrabasso
referring to an instrument (or to its lowest string) were entirely
interchangeable. Consequently, we need to be careful when we encounter contrabasso
in the sources, because its meaning was not necessarily the same as
today's. In concluding these introductory comments, I mentioned the
fact that some of the earliest appearances of the term contrabasso
as referring to bass instrument types occurred in Venetian areas, and I
noted the im-portance of the connections between Venice and the
Bavarian Court at the time.
In the bulk of the paper I explored how the terms violone and contrabasso
were used in Italy, and when and how the "double bass" as a transposing
instrument was used in the Italian repertoire. I believe that in at
least the first three-quarters of the seventeenth century, "violone"
without further specification was a non-transposing eight-foot viola da braccio instrument of the larger type with possible extensions into the twelve-foot register (F'-C).
However, when composers (or printers) meant to include an instrument
capable of playing most of the bass line an octave below the written
pitch, they referred to a large viola da gamba type (larger than the
bass) by adding modifiers such as grande, grosso, doppio, contrabbasso, in contrabasso,
or any combination of these, as Stephen Bonta and Tharald Borgir
already hypothesized in the late 1970s. Based on the often poor quality
of the lowest pure or loaded gut strings before the l670s, I also
argued that violoni as bass violins would, as a rule, always need an
extension (in the bass) of at least one whole step lower than the
lowest pitch to be played in the composition, but that in the case of
the gamba-type violoni at least one string below the lowest
used pitch was needed for acceptable resonant sound production. In
making this point I made a lengthy excursus discussing tunings in
Banchieri's Conclusioni nel suono dell'organo (1609) and L 'Organo suonarino (1611), Praetorius's Syntagma Musicum (1619), Gasparo Zannetti' s 1645 Il scolaro per imparare a suonare di violino, et altri stromenti, and Bismantova's 1694 Aggiunta to his Compendio musicale (1677).
After demonstrating a number of examples of various possible
uses of the different types of violoni in church music in Venice and in
Bologna (San Petronio), I briefly considered some cases at court
(Modena, Rome) and in opera (Venice, Florence). In conclusion then, if
we consider that only the "violone grande in contrabbasso"
(and similar terms) can refer to a transposing bowed double bass
instrument, its use in seventeenth-century Italy seems to have been
limited to a few exceptional large-scale polychoral sacred compositions
in the Repubblica Serenissima (maybe because of German
influences), and to large-scale sacred music in very large and resonant
churches (as in Bologna) beginning in the late l650s. Its use seems to
become slightly more com-mon in the late l680s, but mainly in church
and court ensembles, whereas in theatrical and other secular vocal
repertoire we must wait until the eighteenth century to find double
basses. All other references to violoni without further modifiers seem
to require six-string gambas in G' (probably mainly in Venetian areas)
or bass violins in B~' (and from the l670s also violoncellos
in C, though not in Rome until the l720s) that played the bass line at
pitch. Both were able to occasionally transpose down an octave in
cadences, as theorbo and archlute players did, and similarly to the way
organists used their short pedal board. Until the l670s (when
silver-wound bass strings were introduced) the two instruments may well
have had an identical range (C-d) because of the avoidance of playing on the lowest string on the G' gamba or on the lowest open string on the B~'
bass violin. With the improvement in strings the G' gamba may have been
used increasingly as a fully transposing instrument, whereas the cello
in C could use its full but exclusively eight-foot range, developing
instead its higher register.
A lively discussion between panelists and members of the
audi-ence continued even after Sadie had concluded this fascinating
session. Although the conference organization needed the room for the
next event and asked us to leave, a fruitful exchange of ideas kept on
going over dinner on the beautiful late-Gothic Grote Markt in Leuven.
Some ofthe most important general conclusions to be made after this
short session are first, that at least in Italy and France the use of a
sixteen-foot double bass was extremely rare until late in the
seventeenth century; and second, that a major reassessment is needed in
the choice of bowed string bass instruments, particularly in orchestras
and church/chamber music ensembles that present themselves as
historically informed performing groups.
RECENT RESEARCH ON THE VIOLS:
Ian Woodfield
This bibliography is intended as a concise guide to recent
re-search related to the viol. It lists books, articles, dissertations,
selected reviews, published papers, and major scholarly editions of
music. Research on any aspect of the viol (and related instruments such
as the baryton) will qualify for inclusion. Suggestions for additional
entries in any language would be most welcome. They should be sent to
Ian Woodfield, School of Music, Queen's University Belfast, Belfast BT7
INN, Northern Ireland, or e-mailed to <i.woodfield@qub.ac.uk>.
Ashbee, Andrew, Robert Thompson, and Jonathan Wainwright. The Viola da Gamba Society Index of Manuscripts Containing Consort Music. Vol.1. Aldershot, England:Ashgate Publishing, 2001.
Beschi, Luigi. "L' immagine della Musica in Paolo Veronese: Una Proposta per la Lettura del Concerto delle Nozze di Cana." Imago Musicae 16/17 (1999/2000): 171-91.
Charteris, Richard. "New Connections between Eastern Europe and Works by Philips, Dowland, Marais and Others." Chelys 29 (2001): 3-27.
Cheney, Stuart. "Variation Techniques in French Solo Instru-mental Music, 1594-1689." Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 2002.
Fleming, Michael. "A Bookseller's Catalogue of 1657." Chelys 29 (2001): 61-63.
- "Viol-Making in England c.1580-1660." Ph.D. diss., Open University, 2001. (Available on CD-ROM from <viols@flemingoxford.co.uk>.)
- "Instrument-Makers Named Hill and Hunt in Pepys's London." Galpin Society Journal 55 (2002): 382-85.
Reprinted from the Journal of the Viola da Gamba Society of America
For subscription information, contact
Viola da Gamba Society of America
4440 Trieste Drive, Carlsbad, CA 92008
email: vdgsa@enteract.com
web: vdgsa.org
[ Jerry Fuller's Violone Page ]
Copyright © 1995-2008 Jerry Fuller
|
