(Flem. creytertjes; Fr. poche, pochette, pochette d’amour, sourdine; Ger. Posch, Tanzmeistergeige, Taschengeige, Trögl-geige; It. canino, pochetto, sordina, sordino; Lat. linterculus).
A small bowed unfretted fiddle, generally with four strings, made in a great variety of shapes and played from the 16th century to the 19th. Kits can be divided into two general types: a member of the rebec family, either pear-shaped or resembling a narrow boat, with a distinctly vaulted back; or a miniature viol, violin, mandore or guitar, with a slightly arched back and a long neck. Not all have a soundpost or bass-bar; their presence depends on the size and shape of each instrument. The tuning is generally in 5ths, sometimes at the pitch of the violin, but more often a 4th or a 5th (occasionally an octave) higher if there are only three strings. Surviving kits range from simple rustic instruments to the products of such makers as Joachim Tielke and Stradivari (who left working patterns for different types of kit, including the boat shape labelled ‘canino’ and elongated violin shapes of which the last is dated 1733).
The word ‘kit’ probably arose from the idea that the diminutive instruments were ‘kittens’ to the larger bowed instruments such as those of the violin family, which were said, however erroneously, to be strung with catgut. The term ‘poche’ was said by Trichet to describe the leather case in which the instrument was kept; Mersenne said that it was kept in the pockets (poches) of violinists who taught dancing. ‘Taschengeige’ also relates the instrument to a pocket, and ‘Tanzmeistergeige’ indicates its use by a dancing-master. ‘Sordino’ and ‘sourdine’ are descriptive of its small sound, and ‘canino’ compares it with a canine tooth. ‘Linterculus’ points to its resemblance to a small boat.
Some kits could be regarded simply as rebecs, but it is to the rebec that the name ‘kit’ seems first to have been applied. When this happened is uncertain, but the term was in use in England in the first quarter of the 16th century. In the Interlude of the Four Elements (c1517) Humanity says: ‘This dance would do mich better yet/If we had a kit or taberet’. There is no evidence that this meant anything other than the pear-shaped rebec. In the late 17th century Randle Holme III drew a picture of a rebec and wrote by it ‘A Kit with foure bowed strings’ (GB-Lbl Harl.2027, f.272). The French term poche also included instruments of the rebec shape, as indicated by several references to its similarity to the mandora. For instance, on 7 January 1625 an inventory was made of the instruments belonging to François Richomme, ‘violinist in ordinary to the king, and king of the minstrels of the kingdom of France’, and among its items was ‘une … poche façon de mandore’. One of Praetorius’s three pictures (Syntagma musicum, 2/1619) of Poschen is identical to a three-stringed rebec.
During the 16th century some members of the rebec family became narrower in proportion to their length than had hitherto been usual. One of these, now in the Museo Civico at Bologna, has the inscription ‘Baptista Bressano’. It is in the form of a fish, and was perhaps used for an intermedio or some other dramatic production. A similar instrument can be seen in the woodcut ‘Youth’, from The Ages of Women by Tobias Stimmer (1539–84). By the end of the 16th century this type was firmly established in the shape of a narrow boat, still with a vaulted back, but sometimes with a clear demarcation between the body and neck, even when they were made from one piece of wood. Perhaps to compensate for its relatively simple shape, it was often lavishly decorated with inlaid wood, ivory, ebony or jewels, such as was another ‘poche’ from the collection of François Richomme. ‘Enriched by rubies, mother-of-pearl and seed pearls’, its case was furnished with a lock and key, an indication of the instrument’s value. Mersenne, however, remarked that such ornamentation would not improve an instrument’s musical qualities. A German or Swiss kit in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, has its back carved with animals, birds, isolated musical instruments (including a jew’s harp) and cherubic dancers and instrumentalists (fig.2a). Although it was still being made in the early 19th century, the boat-shaped kit flourished most during the 17th, when it was described in Cotgrave’s Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (1611):
Poche: f. … also, the little narrow, and long Violin (having the backe of one peece) which French dauncers, or dauncing Maisters, carrie about with them in a case, when they goe to teach their Schollers.
Late in the 17th century new shapes appeared, originating mainly in France. The body and neck became quite separate, the former resembling a viol, violin or guitar, but sometimes being a festooned hybrid (fig.2b). The viol form, however, was different from its prototype in that it had no frets, and also that the back was often slightly arched like that of a violin. Unlike the boat-shaped kit, this type was rarely decorated, its visual beauty being in the outer design, the wood and the varnish. In the late 18th century Hawkins, having referred to the narrow ‘poches’ described by Mersenne, added ‘In England this instrument is called a Kit, it is now made in the form of a violin’. By this time the influence of the viola d’amore had caused the occasional addition of sympathetic strings, resulting in the pochette d’amour (an example by Giovanni Battista Genova of Turin, c1765, is in the Royal College of Music, London; fig.2c).
The kit was played at all social levels: it served on the stage, at home and as a toy for children. The writer of The Christian State of Matrimony (1543) condemned those people who came to church with ‘a great noise of harpes, lutes, kyttes, basens and drommes, wherwyth they trouble the whole church, and hyndre them in matters pertayninge to God’. Drayton, in his Poly-Olbion (London, 1613) described the kit as being a favourite instrument of wandering fiddlers. In Cesare Negri’s dance treatise Le gratie d’amore, performed before Don John of Austria on 26 June 1574, the allegorical figure ‘La Perseveranza’ was followed onto the stage by a shepherd carrying a ‘sordina’. Shepherds are also associated with kits in Monteverdi’s Orfeo (1607), but here the instruments are described as ‘violini piccoli alla Francese’. In the painting Peasant Children attributed to Antoine Le Nain, now in the Glasgow Art Gallery, one child plays a kit and another a pipe. His Young Musicians (in the private collection of Lord Aldenham) depicts a kit played in consort with a singer and guitarist. Lully’s violin-shaped kit is now in the Paris Conservatoire, and at the top of the social scale the grand dauphin, eldest son of Louis XIV, had a boat-shaped kit made by Dimanche Drouyn of Paris (fig.2d). This ivory-backed instrument, together with its bow and leather case, is now in the Victoria and Albert Museum. Leopold Mozart wrote in his Violinschule (1756) that the kit was then ‘almost obsolete’. However, Robert Bremner in London published among his list of wares (c1765):
Little
Violins and Kits
Bows for small Violins & Kits
Bridges for Kits, Violins, Tenors, Viol de Gambo’s and Basses
Pegs or Pins for ditto
Tail Pieces for ditto.
One of his customers may have been Francis Pemberton, described by Hawkins as
a dancing master of London, lately deceased, who was so excellent a master of the Kit, that he was able to play solos on it, exhibiting in his performance all the graces and elegancies of the violin, which is all the more to be wondered at as he was a very corpulent man.
Very little music was composed specifically for the kit so the performer generally played violin pieces or popular tunes. Hawkins wrote that the powers of the kit were ‘co-extensive with those of the violin’, but whether or not the performer played above the first position depended on the instrument and the manner in which it was held. A kit by James Aird of Glasgow made in about 1780, complete with a book of tunes written out by a former owner, John Hall of Ayr (1788–1862) is now in the Glasgow Museum. No instrument is specified for the music, but the dance, songs and marches in the book are playable on the violin and some are accompanied. Many of them are suitable for the kit. In 1858, when performance on the instrument was rare, Louis Clapisson acquired a kit by Stradivari, and composed a gavotte for it in his opera Les trois Nicolas. This instrument, violin-shaped and dated 1717 (fig.3), was originally brought to France by Luigi Tarisio, and is now in the Musée de la Musique, Paris (Clapisson was its first curator).
HawkinsH
MersenneHU
PraetoriusSM, ii
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MARY REMNANT