“For the Sake of Fullness of Music in the Choir”—Performance Practice and the Double Bass at the Kroměříž Court

Abstract

Most modern soloists have by now widely accepted the premise that surviving music notation from the baroque period does not tell us all we need to know in order to realize a historically informed performance. This same basic understanding has not been extended to the use of bowed bass instruments in basso continuo. Too often, when performers encounter a bowed bass part, they assume that the instrument specified (if they are so lucky as to have such a specification) must be capable of playing all of the notes on the page. Using source materials from the period, I will argue that this was not the case. Using central European and English sources between c.1670 and 1715, I argue that bowed basses at 16-foot pitch were being used to reinforce tutti passages as early as the 1670s, but that their presence was, in part, determined by the size of the ensemble and the size of the venue. In urging a reconsideration of how we conceive of the roles of basses at 16-foot pitch, I will also use the earliest surviving English “double bass” part to make a case for the use of the double bass in recitative in London theaters in the first decades of the eighteenth century.