J. S. Bach, the Viola da Gamba, and Temperament in the Early Eighteenth Century

Abstract:J. S. Bach's extant works for viola da gamba (or viol) include the well-known arias in the St. Matthew Passion and the St. John Passion; the three sonatas for viol and harpsichord (BWV 1027–1029); the Brandenburg Concerto No. 6; and obbligato parts in several cantatas. While these works span Bach's career and offer a range of approaches to the instrument, they share one salient feature: all are accompanied by keyboard. Thus, viol players in Bach's day would have had to tune their instruments to the keyboard and adopt its temperament. By the 1720s, this would likely have been a well- or quasi-equal temperament, one of the new circulating temperaments developed by German keyboard players that allowed for the use of remote keys while maintaining a distinct sonic character for each key. The recently discovered Instruction oder eine anweisung auff der Violadigamba (ca. 1730), a manuscript viol treatise that probably originated in Saxony, offers enharmonic equivalence and a relatively broad range of usable keys. These features accord with extant works by Bach and Telemann and offer a glimpse of how circulating keyboard temperaments may have been adapted to the viol.Yet, viol players during the first half of the eighteenth century also had their own native approaches to temperament that had developed in tandem with the repertoires and musical cultures associated with the instrument. In particular, the viol was still recognized as having originated in England, and by the early years of Bach's career generations of viol players, repertoires, and practices had moved freely between England and German-speaking regions. A consideration of tuning and temperament as it relates to the viol in Bach's music therefore invites a broader interrogation of how eighteenth-century viol players thought about temperament, and how their native approaches to the problem of the syntonic comma differed from those of keyboard players. After all, by the eighteenth century most English viol players were gentleman amateurs who favored diatonic music in a limited number of keys and preferred ease of tuning and pure diatonic intervals over the remote keys offered by circulating temperaments.English temperaments for viol promulgated during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are starkly different from the German temperaments that have been embraced as modern by subsequent generations of musicians and scholars. Yet their proponents presented their viol-specific tuning systems among the emergent milieu of the Royal Society of London and other institutions associated with the new empirical science. Mathematician Thomas Salmon and the inventor of the marine chronometer, John Harrison, both published temperaments they developed using the viol that they claimed represented the vanguard of musical science and that differed significantly from the "gleich rein" temperaments propounded by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach and other German keyboard players. These divergent approaches reflect differences in both cultural and aesthetic values as well as differences between the communities of practice associated with the viol versus the keyboard. Little-known temperaments by viol virtuoso Carl Friedrich Abel, who worked in both Germany and England, may offer a détente between the temperaments advanced as modern by German keyboard players and those developed by English viol players with competing claims to authority and modernity.