The violone grosso and violone of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. In 1721 Johann Sebastian Bach presented a score of six concertos to the Margrave of Brandenburg. Bach was working in Cöthen at this time, a Calvinist town where instrumental music was not performed in church, writing instrumental music and solo cantatas at the court of Prince Leopold of Anhält-Cöthen. Some discussions of these “Brandenburg” concertos have examined the “violone” part as if it were a double bass part and speculated on the tuning of the instrument for which this compass was specific. As recently as 1993, at the time of the New London Consort recording of the Brandenburg Concertos, I was still a refusenik as far as the so called 8ft violone was concerned. Notwithstanding the excellent work that Laurence Dreyfuss had done, published in “Bach’s Continuo Group” 1987, and which I was aware of, I insisted that a large contrabasso type instrument was the right string bass to use. Since that recording Mr. Dreyfuss’ book has looked down at me from the shelf above my desk giving rise to nagging doubts that question long held opinions. Covering old ground again, in preparation for a talk on the many meanings of the word violone to the Viola da Gamba Society of Great Britain in 2003, those opinions changed as I began to interpret the evidence anew. The compass of the bass part over all 6 concertos is Bb to f’ sharp at notated pitch. Only concertos 2, 4 and 5 have a stave dedicated to the violone, always the lowest string stave sitting just above the cembalo. Concerto 2 has a range of C to e’, concerto 4 D to f’ and concerto 5 D to f’ sharp. What instrument or instruments did Bach have in mind and was it his intention that the bass line transposed be down an octave? Two other books have transformed my view of the performing practise of concerted (and liturgical) music in the 17th and 18th century. The first was Andrew Parrot’s “Essential Bach Choir”, a book inspired by Joshua Rifkin’s ground breaking paper delivered in Boston, 1981 on the subject of the proven performing resources that Bach had at his disposal at Leipzig. This paper broke with the tradition of performing Bach’s choral works with multiple performers on each part, showing that vocal concertists sang each chorus part alone, with occasional support from a second set of single singers, called ripienists, in clearly designated sections (from seperate sets of parts only including the music the ripienists are called upon to sing). The careful analysis of the performers available to Bach in Leipzig and the distribution of those forces across the five churches he was responsible for (the Nikolaikirche, Thomaskirche, Petrikirche, Neue Kirche and Johanniskirche), and a close look at the surviving performance parts reinforce an argument that is impossible to refute, though many remain unhappy with the conclusions. The second of these two revelatory books, Richard Maunder’s “The Scoring of the Baroque Concerto” published in 2004, shows a very clear tradition of one to a part performance of “concertos” until 1740 that Maunder backs up by detailed analysis of published part sets and original performing material, and an insistence on a literal interpretation of the indicated instrumentation. Some early concertos do not follow the model of a soloist set against a group that Vivaldi developed. They may, on occasion, have been performed by larger forces: this possibility would be indicated by the composer. These two studies also show that ‘solo’ and ‘tutti’ markings in published and manuscript parts are an indicator to the performer that his part is more or less exposed and not an instruction to putative desk partners to be silent or rejoin. The information in the part was all that was available to the musician. In his introduction Maunder is very clear that a score’s “chief function was as a blueprint for the copyist of parts and, except in the opera-house, they were not normally used in performance; nor were they published except on the rarest of occasions.” [Maunder Op. cit. p7] Parrot/Rifkin and Maunder point out that sharing parts as we do today was not common practise in the 17th and early 18th centuries. Reading hand written parts by candlelight could not have been easy work, particularly in an age before modern spectacles. If the Brandenburg concertos were originally intended for one performer to a part, playing the violone part on a large bass viol began to seem much more credible, further undermining my previously entrenched position. [On several occasions the double bass player and iconic early music pioneer, Francis Baines reminisced to me that as a young player, every double bassist was given his own stand and part. Maybe it was a gentle hint that I was hogging the stand. Francis was born in 1917 and passed away in 1999. I’m guessing that he was playing professionally by the late 1930s.] In Bologna, where the first concertos were published in 1685, seperate parts for violoncello and violone are often included. Stephen Bonta’s papers “From violone to violoncello: a question of strings”, 1977 and “Terminology for the bass violin in the 17th century” 1979 have shown that in Italy, at least by the end of the 17th century, “violone” indicated a large bass violin that may have been tuned the same as the new smaller violoncello. The top a string could be tuned to g as the long string length might make an a one step too far. It could also be tuned as the French did, a whole tone lower, Bb f c g. There is an alternate example of 2 sizes of instrument, identically tuned: larger and smaller sizes of viola existed in the 17th century. A bigger bodied instrument took the lower of the inner parts, a smaller the higher. In Rome and Venice the 2nd bass part is figured and appears to be intended for a chordal instrument, most usually the cembalo. There is no evidence of a second string bass instrument as in the Bolognese manner. In all three places any suggestion to double the parts is always specified. Valentini (in Rome) is alone in using the term contrabasso. In the concertos of the Venetian Tomaso Albinoni an uncomfortable 2 octave gap occurs at certain points between violoncello and contrabass if the lower part is played at 16ft. In Maunder’s analysis, that 2nd bass line is taken only by the cembalo. There is only one octave seperating the 2 bass lines at those points and on the whole they are in unison, although the result is a sparser texture than we are used to nowadays. Guiseppe Tartini’s words to Francesco Algaratti at the Berlin court in a letter dated 24th February 1750 come to mind: “these little sonatas of mine are provided with a bass for the sake of tradition. I play them without the bassetto and that is my true intention” [“Le piccole sonate mie a violino solo hanno il basso per cerimonia; particolarita che non le scrissi. Io suono senza bassetto e questa e la mia vera intenzione”]. That is also a sparse texture. [Strangely, there is one collection of concertos that Maunder does not neccessarily exclude the contrabasso from, even though a reading of the evidence he presents in his book, as it appears to me, does not seem to justify an exemption. For reasons of over familiarity, it is the one piece that we all might care to be excused from: Vivaldi’s Four Seasons]. These are Italian examples but like other Italian practises, the concerto spread and became fashionable north of the Alps in short order. Maunder identifies the 12 concertos of Georg Muffat’s “Auserlesener mit Ernst- und Lust-gemeggter Instrumental-Music”, Passau 1701 as the first published in Germany. Muffat says they were written in the 1680s, some of them during a visit to Rome in 1682. In the preface, he is careful to describe, in some detail, how to double the instrumental parts if needed. It’s certain that Bach was aware of at least Vivaldi’s opus 3 and 4 concertos because he transcribed some of them. Bach may not have had much chance to work with a low doubling string bass until he moved to Leipzig as the musical establishments of the appointments he held before 1723 may not have included a large bass. Dreyfuss [Op. cit p153] has discovered one date when Bach it seems did have a contrabass at his disposal. For a performance at Weissenfels of Cantata 208 on February 23rd, 1713 (while he was working at Weimar), the lowest stave is labelled Cont. e violono grosso for the 11th and 15th movements. In other Mülhausen and Weimar cantatas the violone part is occasionally written an octave lower than the cello (in autograph parts), a clear indication that the violone was not transposing the part to a lower octave. This could be the model for the Brandenburg concertos 2-5: 2 string basses in unison one or the other dropping an octave to reinforce the texture for some measures. If Bach thought that a violone grosso was available to the Margrave, it must have seemed an exciting addition to the manuscript score for the largest of the concertos to give it a grandeur and majesty quite different from the others in the set. He was certainly interested in new musical innovations: late in life he suggested improvements to the forte piano to its maker Silberman and become an agent for their sale.