Performance Practice and Technique in Marin Marais' Pièces de Viole

This book, primarily written for gambists, was created to serve several purposes. First, the book offers a thorough and systematic method for the development and mastery of the specific performance techniques required by Marais' Pièces de viole and by extension, other works in the French baroque repertoire. The Pièces, over five hundred pieces elaborately detailed with performance indications, represent some of the best music ever written for solo viol and are unsurpassed in scope, quality, and depth of expression. All of the music included in the method is taken from Marais' five volumes of Pièces de viole, and the discussion of it is based on the information available from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources and from Marais' own explicit and elaborately detailed performance indications. Second, it is intended as a guide in the development of a more general and comprehensive technical foundation required by players of the French repertoire and the solo virtuoso music of other national schools. A third objective is to provide a description of the common dances and representative character pieces in the suites and to demonstrate how the musical expression is both dependent on and well served by the historically appropriate technique. A final objective is to provide a method that deals with most, if not all, of the technical and musical aspects presented in an entire piece of music so that the player understands the context in which these aspects are found. The material for each chapter is based on the musical and technical requirements of a single movement. All aspects of bowing, fingering, ornamentation, expressive nuances, and stylistic principles are discussed and are accompanied by appropriate exercises. Additional pieces which offer more practice in the techniques presented within the chapter are included at the end of each chapter.