One of the most important bowed string instruments of the Renaissance, used especially by courtly Italian poet-musicians of the 15th and 16th centuries to accompany their improvised recitations of lyric and narrative poetry. In its fully developed form, not documented before the late 15th century, the lira da braccio had a body shaped like a violin, but with a wide fingerboard, a relatively flat bridge and a leaf-shaped pegbox with frontal pegs (fig.1). It normally had seven strings, five on the fingerboard and two off-board drones. In 16th-century sources it is often called simply ‘lira’, or even ‘viola’. Sometimes writers (for example, Ganassi in Regola rubertina, 1542) called it ‘lira di sette corde’ or ‘lira moderna’, to differentiate it from the antique lyre from which it was supposed (erroneously) to derive.
Lanfranco (in Scintille di musica, 1533) and writers after him gave the tuning for the seven-string lira da braccio as d/d'–g/g'–d'–a'–e'', that is, like a violin with a low d string and with the bottom two pairs of strings in octaves. Although Lanfranco called the two G strings ‘bordoni’, the Pesaro manuscript cited below makes clear that the D strings were in fact the off-board drones. Praetorius (2/1619) was the only theorist to depict the instrument with frets, and he gave the pitch of the top string as d'' not e'', a 4th and not a 5th above the second string.
The instrument was designed for chordal playing. The bows, therefore, were either very long or, if short, designed so that the hair and the stick were as far apart as possible, as pictorial sources attest. The many pictures reproduced by Winternitz and Witten show, too, that the instrument was supported against the left shoulder, but held with the pegbox considerably lower than the body of the instrument, although in some pictures smaller instruments are held horizontally or even with the pegbox slightly raised.
Disertori was the first to attempt to reconstruct the playing technique of the lira da braccio, by examining the possibility that the instrument was used to play late 15th- and early 16th-century frottolas; he drew attention to the fact that some pictures show players apparently stopping the off-board drones by means of a metal ring attached to their left thumb. A further reconstruction of playing technique for modern performers of the lira da braccio has been provided by Jones who has analysed chord possibilities and fingerings for the instrument. An idea of the chordal character of lira accompaniments can be gained from studying the fragments of ‘recitative’ (only the vocal part survives) sung as an invocation to Pan by Andrea dalla Viola accompanying himself on a lira da braccio at the first performance of Agostino Beccari’s Il sacrificio in 1554 (the music is in Einstein, Solerti and Jones).
The most tangible evidence, though, of the way the lira da braccio was actually played comes from a late 16th-century manuscript in Pesaro’s Biblioteca Oliveriana (1144, olim 1193), first studied by Rubsamen (JAMS, xxi, 1968, pp.286–99). The short section of the manuscript devoted to the lira includes several charts showing standard chord positions on the instrument, one complete setting of the romanesca for solo lira and a fragment of a passamezzo. The manuscript shows that the lira normally played triple and quadruple stops, but there are certain limitations to the chord positions available on the instrument. The notes of a chord always have to lie on adjacent strings, for example, since the bow cannot skip over middle strings. And the player can stop strings below an open one only occasionally because of the difficulty of the left-hand technique. Indeed, the Pesaro manuscript often indicates that one finger is required to stop all three middle strings (jeu barré). Thus the instrument could not play all chords in all inversions; the C major triad, for example, lies most conveniently under the fingers in 6-4 position. The romanesca, the beginning of which appears in ex.1, consists largely of a melody accompanied by multiple-stopped triads, a feature that suggests that the top two or three strings were reserved for melodic writing or passage-work, and the lower ones for chords.
The range of the instrument and its playing technique indicate, too, that performers must customarily have sung in a range below that of their accompaniment. Ganassi (Lettione seconda, 1543) said as much when describing the technique as the ‘prattica del dire i bassi accompagnado con il suon della Lyra’ (‘the practice of singing basses accompanied by the lira’). And Mersenne (1636–7), in writing about the lirone, explained that ‘the bass voice is more suitable than the others for joining to this instrument so as to offset the roughness of the fourth, which ofttimes is met without the fifth below. But it produces a very good effect when the voice produces the fifth’. That is, the singer can supply the root of a 6-4 chord. And a sung bass line offsets nicely the soprano passage-work and the chords that can go below g only when the drones are called into play.
Only a few museums possess lire da braccio in a state approaching their original condition. The most beautiful by far is one by Giovanni d’Andrea da Verona, dated 1511, now in the instrument collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna (fig.2). The belly is shaped like a male torso and the front of the pegbox shows a grotesque male face; the back, on the other hand, is carved in the form of a female torso with a mask and acanthus leaves superimposed and with a female face on the back of the pegbox. The length of its body is 51·5 cm, thus longer than either of the other two most notable surviving instruments, the undated one by Giovanni Maria da Brescia in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (with a body length of 38·7 cm), and the undated anonymous one in the Brussels Conservatory (with a body length of 43·2 cm).
Although its tuning by 5ths resembles that of the Rebec, the lira da braccio is more closely related to the medieval Fiddle, and, indeed, it might best be regarded as a member of the fiddle family with especially well-defined characteristics. By the second half of the 13th century, Jerome of Moravia described some fiddles with drone strings, and drones are often to be seen in 14th-century pictures of fiddles with two to five strings. The characteristic violin-like shape of the lira, on the other hand, seems not to have evolved until the late 15th century. Winternitz (MGG1) described three principal stages in the development of the instrument’s shape: a relatively long, thin body with a gently incurved waist without corners, and with either C-shaped, round, square or rhomboid soundholes (fig.3); a body divided into two parts, a relatively narrow upper and a shorter, broader lower section, almost invariably with C-holes (fig.4); and the fully developed violin-like shape with three bouts, corners and f-holes. However, iconographical sources dating from the end of the 15th century to the early 16th century show that all of these shapes existed simultaneously, thereby refuting the theory of development (see Jones).
These three shapes appear in innumerable pictorial sources (many of them reproduced in the various studies by Winternitz and Witten) and especially Italian pictures, for the instrument was developed and cultivated chiefly in Italy during the 15th and 16th centuries, and appeared in other European countries only to the extent that Italian culture had an influence. In line with the instrument’s supposed ancient lineage it is most often shown in the hands of mythological or allegorical characters, or sometimes as a member of angel consorts. Above all, the lira da braccio was associated with Orpheus (taming the animals, subduing the infernal spirits or leading Euridice out of hell) and Apollo (winning the contest with Marsyas or Pan, or leading the Muses), to judge from the quantity of pictorial evidence. But the instrument is also shown being played by Homer, King David, Musica, angels and various others.
The relationship of the instrument to ancient culture explains why it was taken up by those 15th-century Italian poet-improvisers, the Brandolini brothers, Leonardo Giustiniani in Venice, Pietrobono in Ferrara, Atalante, Benedetto Gareth in Naples, Serafino all’ Aquila in the service of Ascanio Sforza in Rome, the philosopher Marsilio Ficino, the painters Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci and so on, who often sang their epic and narrative verses, their strambotti in ottava rima, their capitoli and other narratives in terza rima, odes, sonnets, ballate and other poetic forms, to the accompaniment of the lira da braccio. It is not surprising, then, that Baccio Ugolino played the instrument as Orpheus in the Mantuan performance of Angelo Poliziano’s Orfeo in 1471, and that it was associated with ancient gods and heroes in dramatic and quasi-dramatic entertainments in Italy throughout the 16th century. Among the greatest virtuosos of the 16th century was the composer Alessandro Striggio, whom Cosimo Bartoli (Ragionamenti, 1567) described as being able to play on the instrument four parts at once with such lightness and so musically that the listeners were astounded (‘eccellentissimo nel sonar la viola e far sentir in essa quattro parti a un tratto con tanta leggiadria et con tanta musica che fa stupire gli ascoltanti’).
The instrument played some part in 16th-century ensembles as well as accompanying solo singing, its chief role. Italian intermedio orchestras sometimes called for lire. As an ensemble instrument it may sometimes have played a single line in the soprano register, and it may sometimes have served as a proto-continuo instrument, taking advantage of its special qualities by adding chords beneath the given melodic line. The Lirone or lira da gamba, a bass counterpart to the lira da braccio, played between the knees like a viol, was developed in the 16th century, and seems to have gained more and more prominence as the century wore on. The lira da braccio disappeared from use early in the 17th century, and was never revived. A late mention of the lira occurs in the title of a violin piece by Biagio Marini published in 1626. His Capriccio per sonare il violino con tre corde à modo di lira was written at a time when the lira da braccio was already out of fashion, but its sounds were still remembered (the piece is reproduced in Jones).
EinsteinIM
MGG1 (E. Winternitz)
SolertiMBD
A. Hajdecki: Die italienische Lira da Braccio (Mostar, 1892/R)
G.R. Hayes: Musical Instruments and their Music, 1500–1750, ii: The Viols and other Bowed Instruments (London, 1930)
B. Disertori: ‘L’arciviolatalira in un quadro del seicento’, RMI, xliv (1940), 199–211
B. Disertori: ‘Pratica e tecnica della lira da braccio’, RMI, xlv (1941), 150–75
E. Haraszti: ‘La technique des improvisateurs de langue vulgaire et de latin au Quattrocento’, RBM, ix (1955), 12–31
E. Winternitz: Musical Instruments and their Symbolism in Western Art (New York, 1967, 2/1979)
H.M. Brown: Sixteenth-Century Instrumentation: the Music for the Florentine Intermedii, MSD, xxx (1973), 223–25
L.C. Witten: ‘Apollo, Orpheus, and David’, JAMIS, i (1975), 5–55
E. Winternitz: Leonardo da Vinci as a Musician (New Haven, CT, and London, 1982)
V. Ivanoff: Das Pesaro-Manuskript (Tutzing, 1988)
S.S. Jones: The Lira da braccio (Bloomington, IN, 1995)
HOWARD MAYER BROWN/STERLING SCOTT JONES