The viella’s most recognizable shape and disposition was:

• resonator slightly broader than that of modern strings, either in oval shape or gently 'waisted'

• pegbox with pegs piercing the front

• raised bridge and fingerboard

• two soundholes somewhat broader than modern strings

• carved 'fluted' sides

• a size comfortable for being held on the shoulder

• four strings over the fingerboard that could be stopped, and a single string off the side of the fingerboard, 'unstopped'

Experimentation continued with the viella's shape, string number, and setup, and just like its names, geographic variants certainly developed, perhaps according to distinctive uses or local musical practices. But the most familiar remained a model with four strings over the fingerboard and a single string 'off-board'. 

The viella rose to the height of its fame with the troubadours, as the most celebrated tool for song accompaniment. In France it was deeply associated with these itinerant poets. Italy provides further literary vignettes of the viella's developing relationship to learned musical genres, specifically those of collections of vocal polyphony. Yet we must not imagine that the viella approached these genres in the same way as a vocalist, or that it 'read' from notated music. Far overshadowing these tentative connections with composed polyphony, there are many other situations where the viella thrived. In Italy, professional viella players supported lauda rituals, and the viella was used to accompany poetic recitation and the performances of canterini, whose arts can be traced back to the troubadours and common jongaleurs, and even further back to reciters of epics in the early middle ages. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the canterino's practice of musical recitation of long 'texts' could be appraised by anyone visiting Italian piazzas in major cities. The viella's social uses were without limit: there were professional viellatores in the employment of lords, playing the viella was recommended as a proper pastime for high-born youths, and depictions of the viella in the hands of angels outnumber those of any other instrument of the time.

What it was not: Modern performers have searched for ways to fit the viella to written sources of music, and have largely assumed that the viella functioned like later bowed strings - those that are familiar to us today, specifically the violin and viol families - that is, they imagine it as a 'fiddle' or specifically intended for performing melodies mirroring the range and agility of the human voice, and even beyond. They have also imagined that larger variants, held downward or 'a gamba' were common. But this is not the case: the viella was used to produce chordal textures with limited melodic phrases. It was primarily played on the shoulder (in Italy exclusively da braccio, with da gamba models seen in Europe primarily pre-1300 and again at the end of the fifteenth century). It functioned as much as a tool for accompanying the voice as well as playing purely instrumental music, and its character was quasi-harmonic. There were not two different types, one for melody and another for 'drones', as some scholars have claimed; the realm of pure melody was explored by other instruments, such as the above mentioned rubeba and rabab.

For the entirety of its career, the viella was viewed as an inheritor of the lyre of classical antiquity, which explains why toward the end of the fifteenth century in Italy, its shape and was further developed to highlight this connection, with strings added to expand its harmonic palette. While toward the sixteenth century new terms were in use to explicitly acknowledge its classical inheritance, such as lira da braccio, the instrument was just was well known by the old name viella or viola, and its performance uses and and character had remained the same. By the late 15th century, a tablature finally appears (Pesaro MS) that demonstrates 'lira' style of playing chords with limited melodic cells interspersed. 

In trying to reconcile their idea of a melodic 'medieval fiddle' with the idea of a harmonic 'lira da braccio', scholars have often imagined a fundamental shift or development toward the sixteenth century. But the fact is that the lira da braccio is nothing more than an enhanced viella, and the function of such an instrument had  remained essentially the same for over five hundred years. 

© Jacob Mariani