Word: viol
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Music lovers may enjoy a rare opportunity tonight at 8:30 when the Boston Society of Ancient Instruments will present at the Memorial Church a concert of viol compositions of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries...
...After years of wrestling his bull fiddle in & out of taxicabs, a Newark musician named Peter Ruggiero invented a collapsible bass viol which folds into a package no bigger than a saxophone case...
...ultra-involved point system which manages to cut away as much credit for every right answer as possible while counting all the wrong answers twice as much. The poor examinee begins to wonder, after a does of this, whether Bix Beiderbecke played a horn or a bass viol. But the Great Collector usually goes on and on, relentlessly playing momentary snatches of Bobby Hackett's guitar, PeeWee Russell's saxophone, and Tommy Dorsey's trumpet cleverly hiding even the labels from view as he feeds ancient record after ancient record into the mouth of the phonograph...
Passion Is Essential. He began by collecting ancient manuscripts and ancient instruments: a pardessus de viole (high-pitched, five-stringed viol), a viole de gambe (six-stringed forerunner of the cello), a viole d'amour (whose seven steel strings vibrate in "sympathy" as the seven gut strings are played), a basse de viole (big forerunner of the stringed bass). He commissioned Pleyel of Paris to make a two-manual, six-pedal harpsichord...
...bassoon what a double bass (bass viol) is to the cello. In its long evolution since Handel wrote for it, it has changed from a vague resemblance to a child's coffin to a strong resemblance to an overcomplicated vacuum cleaner. Its 20-odd feet of wooden tubing are capable of emitting the lowest-sounds known to orchestral music-lower than any at the left end of a piano keyboard. To everybody but a contrabassoonist, its Stygian burps sound like abysmal Bronx cheers...