page_title: Viol
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Viol / History
caption_attribution_description: Detail of a picture of Jan Verkolje, "An elegant couple with musical instruments in an interior
context_page_description: The viol, viola da gamba, or informally gamba, is any one of a family of bowed, fretted and stringed instruments with hollow wooden bodies and pegboxes where the tension on the strings can be increased or decreased to adjust the pitch of each of the strings. Frets on the viol are usually made of gut, tied on the fingerboard around the instrument's neck, to enable the performer to stop the strings more cleanly. Frets improve consistency of intonation and lend the stopped notes a tone that better matches the open strings. Viols first appeared in Spain in the mid to late 15th century and were most popular in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. Early ancestors include the Arabic rebab and the medieval European vielle, but later, more direct possible ancestors include the Venetian viole and the 15th- and 16th-century Spanish vihuela, a 6-course plucked instrument tuned like a lute that looked like but was quite distinct from the 4-course guitar.
context_section_description: Vihuelists began playing their flat-edged instruments with a bow in the second half of the 15th century. Within two or three decades, this led to the evolution of an entirely new and dedicated bowed string instrument that retained many of the features of the original plucked vihuela: a flat back, sharp waist-cuts, frets, thin ribs (initially), and an identical tuning—hence its original name, vihuela de arco; arco is Spanish for "bow".
  An influence in the playing posture has been credited to the example of Moorish rabab players.
  Stefano Pio argues that a re-examination of documents in the light of newly collected data indicates an origin different from the vihuela de arco from Aragon.  According to Pio, the viol (viola da gamba) had its origins and evolved independently in Venice. Pio asserts that it is implausible that the vihuela de arco (which possibly arrived in Rome and Naples after 1483–1487, since Johannes Tinctoris does not mention it prior to this time) underwent such a rapid evolution by Italian instrument makers – not Venetian (circumstances specifically excluded by Lorenzo da Pavia), nor Mantuan or Ferrarese (as evidenced by Isabella and Alfonso I d' Este's orders from luthiers from other cities) – so that a ten-year span brought the birth and diffusion in Italy of a new family of instruments (viole da gamba or viols). These comprised instruments of different size, some as large as the famous violoni as ‘big as a man’ mentioned by Prospero Bernardino in 1493.
  Pio also notes that both in the manuscript of the early 15th-century music theorist Antonius de Leno and in the treatises of the Venetian Silvestro Ganassi dal Fontego and Giovanni Maria Lanfranco (de), the fifth string of the viola da gamba is uniquely called a bordone (drone), although it is not actually a drone and is played the same as the other strings. Pio argues that this inconsistency is justifiable only assuming the invention, during the last part of the fifteenth century, of a larger instrument derived from the medieval violetta, to which were gradually added other strings to allow a greater extension to the low register that resulted from its increased size. The fifth string, already present in some specimens of these violette as a drone (bordone), was incorporated into the neck when they were expanded in size. This was then surpassed by a sixth string, named basso, which fixed the lower sound produced by the instrument. In Pio's view, the origin of the viola da gamba is tied to the evolution of the smaller the medieval violetta or vielle, that was originally fitted with a fifth string drone, where the name remained unchanged even though it ceased to perform this function.
  Ian Woodfield, in his The Early History of the Viol, points to evidence that the viol does in fact start with the vihuela but that Italian makers of the instrument immediately began to apply their own highly developed instrument-making traditions to the early version of the instrument when it was introduced into Italy.
  Initially the family of viole ("viols") shared common characteristics but differed in the way they were played. The increase in the dimensions of the "viola" determined the birth of the viol and the definitive change in the manner the instrument was held, as musicians found it easier to play it vertically. The first consort of viols formed by four players was documented at the end of the fifteenth century in the courts of Mantua and Ferrara, but was also present in popular Venetian music ambience, noted at the Scuola Grande di San Marco, 1499; Venetian culture remained independent of Spanish influence and consequently unfamiliar with the instruments of those lands, such as the bowed vihuela de arco. Groups of viol players, generally called violoni, were established in the Venetian Scuole Grandi around 1530/40, but the highly traditional environment of these institutions suggests that these groups would have already been active in the general urban context during the previous two decades (1510–1520). Some of these players were known to have traveled to distant l
caption: Detail from a painting by Jan Verkolje, Dutch, c. 1674, Elegant Couple (A Musical Interlude). The theme is similar to the classic Music Lesson genre, and features a bass viol, virginal, and cittern (in the woman's hand, out of frame in this detail; see full image). This image highlights the domestic amateur class of viol players.
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