(b late 17th century; d Versailles, ?1728). French luthier and player on the musette and hurdy-gurdy. As early as 1672 Borjon de Scellery remarked upon the popularity of the musette among the French noblemen and the hurdy-gurdy among noble ladies. Bâton l'aîné took advantage of the continuing fashion for rustic instruments, and worked at transforming the musette and hurdy-gurdy from folk instruments into art ones. His younger contemporary Terrasson wrote:
Mr Bâton, luthier at Versailles, was the first who worked at perfecting the hurdy-gurdy [vielle]: he had in his place several old guitars which had not been used for a long time. In 1716 the idea struck him to turn them into hurdy-gurdies, and he carried off this invention with such a great success that people wished to have only hurdy-gurdies mounted on the bodies of guitars; and these sorts of hurdy-gurdies effectively have a stronger and at the same time sweeter sound than that of the old hurdy-gurdies. Mr Bâton also added to that instrument’s keyboard the low e' and the high f'''; he ornamented his hurdy-gurdies with ivory purfling; he gave the neck a form more beautiful and closely resembling the necks of bass viols – so that then all the ladies wished to play the hurdy-gurdy, and soon the preference for this instrument became general…Mr Bâton imagined that, since the hurdy-gurdies mounted on the bodies of guitars had had so much success, that instrument would take on yet more mellow sounds by mounting it on the bodies of lutes and of theorboes. Accordingly, in 1720 he carried out this new idea, and the hurdy-gurdies in the form of a lute had an even greater success than the others. It was then that the hurdy-gurdy began to face up to the other instruments and to be admitted into concerts: Messrs Baptiste [Anet] and Boismortier even composed duets and trios for the hurdy-gurdy and the musette, and all the pieces which had previously been composed for the musette also became hurdy-gurdy pieces.
The success of Bâton's ideas can be gauged in many ways: by the number of paintings and engravings of the period in which members of the nobility were portrayed playing musettes or hurdy-gurdies, by the number of stage works of the period which featured the instrument, by the many title-pages which suggested that their music was suited for these instruments, by the several instruction books published, by the number of makers who turned out these instruments, and by the number of virtuosos on them. The instruments were heard at the Concert Spirituel at Christmas 1731, 1732 and 1733, and were praised by those glad to hear simple tunes but criticized by those who regarded rustic instruments as too primitive.
BrenetC
[? A. Terrasson]: Dissertation historique sur la vielle (Paris, 1741/R, 2/1768)
E. de Bricqueville: ‘Les instruments de musique champêtres au XVIIeet au XVIIIesiècle’, Un coin de la curiosité: les anciens instruments de musique (Paris, 1894), 39–51
E. de Bricqueville: Notice sur la vielle (Paris, 2/1911/R)
C. Flagel: ‘La vielle parisienne sous Louis XV: un modèle pour deux siècles’, Instrumentistes et Luthiers parisiens XVIIe–XIXesiècles, ed. F. Gétreau (Paris, 1988), 116–33
R.A. Green: The Hurdy-Gurdy in Eighteenth-Century France (Bloomington, IN, 1995)
NEAL ZASLAW