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Perspectives - What Exactly is a Violone?

Mar 08, 2024
Greetings from my teaching studio in Havertown Pennsylvania I'm Heather Miller Lardon and I play historical double basses. I'll take you on a little tour of my collection. One of the things I love about the Stamp music festival is that I can play all my instruments there because the repertoire is so broad and each one of them has a different function and a different sound. Double bass instruments have never been standardized, even in today's modern orchestra you will see them in different shapes. different sizes numbers of strings different bows hold all kinds of things this particular instrument I'm holding is a copy of a 1620 Italian diablo base and I have it set up to play baroque, so it has gut strings and frets and

what

not What the frets do is that they allow me to close the strings more easily.
perspectives   what exactly is a violone
I stop these very thick gut strings at the edge of the fret and it gives me a really clear and resonant sound on every note. You will often hear early bass instruments. known as a

violone

and that just means it is a large bass bow instrument. I wanted to mention about this instrument that many of you saw me last summer at the Stanton Music Festival playing a white instrument or one that looked very blonde and I may not have realized this, but it was an instrument that I hadn't bought it yet, it wasn't quite finished and I was trying to buy it and guess

what

it is, this is a Viennese field, this instrument is built on a model that was made in Vienna in 1748 as you can see it has five strings and it also has frets that They serve a similar function to the other instrument that I just showed you.
perspectives   what exactly is a violone

More Interesting Facts About,

perspectives what exactly is a violone...

They have a really distinctive shape. They have very wide, flat rubber corners and ribs at the back with a little indentation there and there's a distinctive flourish on the scroll. There's a relatively flat bridge and that makes it. easier to play chords and double stops, which was really important because this instrument had many concertos written for it and was used in all kinds of Verde Menti chamber music and also in chamber orchestras, so we know that the bassist of haydn in esterhazy used an instrument very similar to this because there are receipts for the strings he bought and in fact haydn wrote in six of his early symphonies he wrote extended solos for violoni.
perspectives   what exactly is a violone
This instrument has a very bright and powerful sound that is really different from today's ideal dark chocolate double bass sound. It had a golden age in and around Vienna, roughly between 1750 and 1820, but it was definitely around long before that and well after as well and works very well in Schubert's trout quintet. The Viennese violin is directly related to the viola da gamba. or vial the vial first appeared in Europe at the end of the 15th century it was built in sizes that roughly corresponded to the human voice all sizes of vinyl are played sitting and held with the legs and in fact the term viola da gamba means vial from the leg the vials are played with a low bow and are mostly tuned in fourths with a third in the middle this is a later model and has a seventh string this was popular in France in the early 18th century in the renaissance the most vials were played in consort as a family and in the baroque era it became very popular as a continuo instrument and as a solo instrument, bach used the base vial in a very stylized way in his sacred music making the most of its otherworldly sound In both the passions of Saint John and Saint Matthew in the lesser-known funeral cantata the two ampoules also invoke death and the Beyond, this instrument is called G and only A and what refers to G are the outer strings because there were different ways to tune it just as a frame of reference this fifth string, the second from the bottom has the same pitch as the low C string on a cello, so you have a pretty wide range on this instrument.
perspectives   what exactly is a violone
This is a copy of a German violin built around 1630. Its scallop shape and flame holes don't affect the sound, but they let you know the person who originally commissioned it. He had a lot of money and could afford nice things. Now the violane was a wonderful and popular instrument for quite some time, but it was eventually replaced by the more versatile cello we know today.

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