What came before the violin? What were bowed strings like in the Middle Ages? What was the medieval fiddle?

Homepage for the

viella or vielle

and the lira da braccio

Bowed strings have been in Europe since at least the 10th century. When the bow was introduced, there was a great deal of experimentation with instrument shape, structure, and technical setup. However, by the 13th century, ideas had coalesced around a somewhat stable model with a particular arrangement of strings. Thus began a ‘period of establishment’ (from c. 1200), where the instrument was called viella (with many derivatives It. viola, Fr. vielle, Ger. fidel). Other bowed instruments also flourished during this time, such as the rubeba family of instruments and others, but none held the distinction and esteem of the European viella.

S. Ginesio with viella, Lucca, late 14th C.

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'.

There is only one direct source for the viella's tunings: Jerome de Moravia, a cleric in Paris c. 1280. These tunings seem quite strange to us today, as they do not follow a straightforward ascending pattern. Two of these three tunings confirm the 4 +1 string setup, and may also evidence 'courses'. The third is a specialized tuning all 'on-board', still reentrant. While Jerome's tunings do hint at the viella's performance uses, it should be cautioned that tunings likely varied from place to place and across the centuries, and they should not necessarily be taken as a fixed standard for the whole of the European middle ages. Another clerical source describes the viella's uses (Johannes de Grocheio, Paris c. 1300), but we also know that the viella was widely revered in vernacular cultures pre- and post-dating any didactic or scholarly source.

*not exact transposition

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.

Viella in manuscript miniature, Morgan Lib MS M.638 fol. 17r, c. 1244-1254

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.

Rubeba or 'ribeca' type instrument, Giovanni Bellini, San Giobbe Altarpiece, Venice c. 1487

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.