Abel, Hume, Marais: Magia consoni et dissoni

Originally from Alicante, Spain, Fernando Marín is a cellist, viola da gamba player and musicologist specialising in Renaissance and Baroque bowed instruments, historically informed performance and chamber music. He holds a doctorate in musicology; his thesis examined the Hispanic vihuela de arco, its sound and gut strings. His research into the origins, playing methods and repertoire of early bowed instruments has informed his work on bowing techniques for accompanying the voice and on the manufacture of historical gut strings.

He studied in Oviedo, Prague, Cologne, Brussels and Barcelona, with Wieland Kuijken among his principal teachers. With soprano Nadine Balbeisi he founded Cantar alla Viola, a duo devoted to medieval and Renaissance music. Their recordings include the complete polyphonic works of Juan Blas de Castro, Robert Jones’s The Second Booke of Songs and Ayres (1601), music for the vihuela de arco in the Kingdom of Aragon, William Corkine’s Each Lovely Grace: The Second Booke of Ayres (1612), and Segreti Accenti, featuring works by Luca Marenzio, Costanzo Festa and Luzzasco Luzzaschi.

His solo recordings include eVIOLution, exploring the origins and development of the viola da gamba; sCORDAtura, devoted to historical gut strings and different tunings; The Art of the Vihuela de Arco; Magia consoni et dissoni; and Cello’s Inside. He designs and builds historical instruments and produces and supervises his own recordings. He also collaborates regularly with Carles Magraner and Capella de Ministrers in concerts and recordings.

Marín has published articles on musical rhetoric, improvisation, gut strings and early music performance in musicological journals, including Nassarre and Quodlibet. With Nadine Balbeisi and composer, choral director, jazz pianist and harpsichordist Jean Kleeb, he formed the trio Viola da Samba, which recorded De rio a Rio.

His research and teaching in historical performance and early bowed instruments have taken him throughout Europe and the United States. In 2017 he received a Leonardo Grant for Researchers and Cultural Creators from the BBVA Foundation for a project on the recovery and musical interpretation of Renaissance bowed vihuelas. He has taught viola da gamba at the Conservatorio Profesional de Música in Zaragoza since 2003.

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Carl [Karl] Friedrich Abel
(b Cöthen, 22 Dec 1723; d London, 20 June 1787). Composer and bass viol player, son of (2) Christian Ferdinand Abel. He was no doubt a pupil of his father’s, especially for the bass viol; but on his father’s death in 1737 Carl Friedrich may have turned to the former relationship with the Bach family and gone to Leipzig to study, as Burney, who knew Abel, stated. By 1743 Abel was a player in the court orchestra under Hasse in Dresden; the connection with the Bachs was maintained – W.F. Bach was an organist there until 1746, and J.S. Bach had held an appointment as court composer from 1736. Abel left Dresden in 1757–8 during the destruction of the city by Frederick the Great. He then travelled, visiting the house of Goethe’s family in Frankfurt and probably the musical centres of Mannheim and Paris. He had already begun to compose in Dresden; the Breitkopf catalogue of 1761 advertises solo and trio sonatas and concertos, all with the flute, and describes Abel as a chamber musician to the King of Poland.

Marin Marais (b Paris, bap. 31 May 1656; d Paris, 15 Aug 1728). French composer and viol player. He is one of the outstanding figures in French music of the Baroque period.

Tobias Hume (b ?c1579; d London, 16 April 1645). English composer and viol player. As a professional soldier he served as an officer in the Swedish and Russian armies, and as a viol player published two important volumes of music, principally for the Lyra viol. When in 1629 he entered the Charterhouse almshouse he was probably 50 (the minimum age of admission); he later died there.

The profession of arms, his vivid and personal literary style, his insistence that the viol ‘shall with ease yeelde full various and as devicefull Musicke as the Lute’, and the fact that most of his music, being in tablature, is inaccessible to most modern musicians, have been the cause both of modern neglect of Hume as a composer of talent, and of his reputation as a musical eccentric.

What is remarkable is that Hume regarded himself primarily as a soldier: ‘I doe not studie Eloquence, or professe Musicke, although I doe love Sense, and affect Harmony: My Profession being, as my Education hath beene, Armes, the onely effeminate part of me, hath beene Musicke; which in mee hath beene alwayes Generous, because never Mercenarie’. Hume's addresses to the reader herald a new vigour that the 17th-century pamphleteers were to bring to English prose; his claim for the viol as a worthy rival to the lute as a solo, an ensemble and a continuo instrument, was an accurate forecast of change in English musical taste.

All of Hume's known compositions are contained in his First Part of Ayres (1605) and Captaine Humes Poeticall Musicke (1607), the former constituting the largest repertory of solo music for the lyra viol by a single composer in the early 17th century. Together, these works comprise instrumental dances, pieces with descriptive, fanciful or humorous titles, programmatic pieces and songs. Hume's First Part of Ayres contains what may be the earliest examples of pizzicato: ‘play one straine with your fingers, the other with your Bow’, ‘to be plaide with your fingers … your Bow ever in your hand’ and col legno: ‘Drum this with the back of your Bow’. This book includes a number of playfully suggestive titles – My Mistresse hath a prettie thing, She loves it well and Hit it in the middle – as well as a Lesson for two to play upon one Viole which requires one player to sit in the lap of the other. His second collection, dedicated to Queen Anne, is more staid in tone; it earned for the composer ‘according to her highnes comandment and pleasure [by warrant, 6 June 1607]: 100 s[hillings]’. While making no great technical demands on the performer, the music displays much skill and invention, both in the exploitation of the potential of the viol and in the effectiveness and the variety of sonorities in the ensemble works.