Scan 259
A dictionary of old English music & musical instruments 1923, 1923
6 lines. Read by computer on 19 September 2026. Printed page 229. See the scan on archive.org.
1the chord indicated in each piece of music written for it and played from Tablature (v. LYRAWAY).
3Each string of the Viol had its own name, counting from the highest downwards, as follows: Treble, Small Mean, Great Mean, Counter-Tenor, Tenor, and Bass.
5The uses to which the Viols were put in England were of great interest and importance. Chronologically the predecessors, and later on for a time the contemporaries, of the violin family, though historically and structurally they had less to do with their successors, the Viols—in all probability introduced into England from the Netherlands—enjoyed a vogue here unequalled in any other country. Nowhere in Europe were the Viols clung to so tenaciously, and nowhere were they given up in favour of the violins with greater reluctance. The English performers brought their virtuosity to a very high pitch, and many foreign students came to England to perfect themselves in the art of Viol-playing. For this purpose Maugars came from France, Paul Kress, David Adams, Vogelsang, August Kuehnel, and others, came from Germany. At this period the technique of the English gambists exceeded that possessed by those of any other country, and the music written here often asks for great dexterity. Most of the musical publications at the beginning of the Seventeenth Century were arranged so that the Madrigals and Ayres which they contained could be performed equally well on the Viols. The decline of the Madrigal and the rise of technique soon made the composition of special music for the instruments of the Viol family an absolute necessity. At first the old vocal music sufficed and it was used for some time; but the advent of the craze for Divisions (q.v.), and the successive development of the In Nomine and the Fancy (q.v.), provided music to meet the popular demand. So rapid was this development of purely instrumental music that scarcely a single generation separated the time when the violist was compelled to play a well-known song if he wished to have a solo, from the period at which elaborate suites and fantasias were being written on an almost wholesale scale, specifically for each and every member of the Viol family, and for all of them in consort. Anthony Holborne, only four years before James I ascended the throne, issued a typical specimen of the former class of composition—music that could be played on
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