| Abstract |
It is traditionally said that the viola da gamba passed out of use in England soon after 1700, and that subsequent sightings (in Handel's *Giulio Cesare* and in the works of Carl Friedrich Abel, for instance) are isolated exceptions to this pattern. In recent years research has revealed a rich eighteenth-century gamba repertory on the Continent, showing that it continued to be cultivated in some places into the nineteenth century. The initial impetus for this study was the discovery of new sources suggesting that the same might be true for Britain. An intensive search has revealed that about 150 people, male, female, professional and amateur, maintained an unbroken tradition from the death of Henry Purcell in 1695 to Arnold Dolmetsch's first early music concerts in London in 1890; new players are still coming to light.\n \nThe core of the proposed book will be a group biography of as many of these people as possible, together with an examination of the music they played, the instruments they used, and the styles of playing they employed, However, I am concerned to place the gamba in the context of wider intellectual and historical currents. I am particularly interested in the roles instruments have in society, the meanings they acquire, and the way these meanings change over time. Thus, around 1715 the gamba changed quite suddenly from a semi-obsolete instrument with a multi-faceted role as a solo and bass continuo instrument, to a tenor-range solo instrument largely played by professional cellists. As members of the Italian opera orchestra in London, these musicians (such as Pietro Chaboud, Giovanni Bononcini, Pippo Amadei and David Boswillibald) were part of an elite group of Italians and Germans who were powerful agents for change in English musical life, and thus the gamba came to represent modernity. It regained this position later in the century (after a fallow period between about 1730 and 1760), when it became associated with the fashion for exotic instruments, largely promoted by German immigrant instrument makers (such as the Moravian John Frederick Hintz), and by extension, with the contemporary change from a musical culture dominated by Italian vocal music to one dominated by German instrumental music. \n\nAbel's London career (he worked there 1759-1782, 1785-7) was an important catalyst. He impelled a number of native and immigrant professionals (including Andreas Lidel, Stephen Paxton, Walter Clagget and Johan Arnold Dahmen) to take up the gamba, and his teaching and example also inspired many amateurs (including Thomas Gainsborough, Lawrence Sterne, Sir Edward Walpole and Benjamin Franklin) to do likewise. It was also played by a remarkable number of women (including Sarah Ottey, Ann Ford, Elisabetta de Gambarini, Lady Elizabeth Pratt and Elizabeth, Countess of Pembroke), who were attracted to it by its aristocratic associations and its distinctive soft, low-pitched, veiled voice - a perfect vehicle for the sensibility cult of the period. \n\nThere are two overlapping strands to the gamba's use in the nineteenth century. The first, represented by amateur followers of Abel (Thomas Cheeseman, John Cawse and Edward Payne) and the occasional visitor, essentially maintained the eighteenth-century solo repertory and style of playing. The second, initiated by an 1845 London concert inspired by Fétis's historical concerts in Paris, began the process of incorporating old instruments into the developing early music movement - in Britain hitherto focussed on Renaissance vocal music. The wheel came full circle when the gamba became associated once again with old music, though the work of players such as Henry Webb, Walter Pettit and Carli Zoeller, and scholars such as John Hullah and Mary Louise Armitt. Thus Dolmetsch, though an important pioneer and the first person to assemble a viol consort since the seventeenth century, was not the lone prophet of twentieth-century legend. |
