(Fr. rebec, rebecq, rebecquet, rebet; Ger. Rebec; It. rebeca, ribeca; Lat. rebeca, rebecum; Sp. rabé, rabel, rebequin).
A bowed instrument with gut strings, normally with a vaulted back and tapering outline. Derived from the Byzantine lūrā and the Arab Rabāb, rebec-type instruments have been known in Europe under different names and in various shapes from the late 10th century or early 11th to the present day, but their use in art music was chiefly during the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In the Hornbostel-Sachs classification system the rebec is classed as a bowed lute (or fiddle).
A detailed account of the rebec with its various spellings from the 13th century onwards is given in Downie’s dissertation (1981). For the purposes of this article the term ‘rebec’ is applied to any instrument covered by the definition above, including its forebears of the 11th and 12th centuries. (Some instruments which have a vaulted back and visible corners are described by certain writers as rebecs and by others as fiddles.)
MARY REMNANT
The terminology of early European rebecs reflects their Byzantine and Arab origins. Martin Gerbert, in his De cantu et musica sacra (St Blasien, 1774/R), reproduced a drawing from a 13th-century manuscript (since destroyed) from the monastery of St Blasius. It shows a pear-shaped instrument with one string and a bow, clearly labelled ‘lyra’. A related instrument in the slightly earlier Hortus deliciarum of Herrad of Landsberg (formerly in F-Sm, but now also destroyed) was described as a ‘lira’. Hieronymus de Moravia, in his Tractatus de musica (after 1272), gave a tuning for the ‘rubeba’, which from its description seems to have been similar to the Moorish rabāb. From about this time onwards, other words of the same derivation were apparently used to describe instruments of the rebec family, including the French ‘rebebe’, ‘reberbe’ and ‘rebesbe’, and the English ‘ribibe’, ‘ribible’, ‘rubebe’ (although this term was sometimes also used for the jew’s harp), ‘rubible’ and ‘rybybe’. ‘Gigue’ appears frequently in literature of the 13th and 14th centuries (leading to ‘Geige’ in German), and is thought to have applied in general to rebec-type instruments, although it may sometimes have referred also to the medieval fiddle (see Gigue (ii)). Its players (gigatores) were, however, listed separately from fiddlers (vidulatores) in many Latin sources, although in the early 14th-century poem Der Busant ‘fedele’ and ‘gige’ are used for the same instrument, thus emphasizing the generic use of the word ‘fiddle’ for any instrument played with a bow. The ‘fiðelere’ mentioned in the Glossary of Aelfric, Abbot of Eynsham (d c1020) may well have been one of the earliest players of a rebec-type instrument in England.
The word ‘rebek’ is found in an early 12th-century list of Arabic and Latin terms (F-Pn lat.14754, f.244v) but variant forms of that spelling do not become frequent until the 14th century. (The well-known ‘rebecam’ cited in a poem by Aimeric de Peyrac, Abbot of Moissac – see §2 below – does not, as often stated, date from c1300, as he lived from c1340 to 1406.) Tinctoris (De inventione et usu musicae, c1481–3) stated that the ‘rebecum’ was sometimes called the ‘marionetta’. As medieval instruments were not standardized, there was inevitably a great deal of overlap among their names. A visual example of the rebec’s being denoted by the generic use of the word ‘fiddle’ occurs in Lydgate’s Pilgrimage of the Life of Man (1426, GB-Lbl Cotton Tiberius A.vii, f.79v), translated from Deguilleville’s Le pélerinage de la vie humaine (1355), where ‘ffedle’ in the text is illustrated by an unmistakable rebec in the margin. Conversely, John Palsgrave’s Lesclarissement de la langue francoyse (1530) uses French cognates of ‘rebec’ to describe not only the rebec, but also the ‘fyddell’ and ‘croude’. Virdung (1511) and Agricola (1529) described rebecs as ‘clein [kleine] Geigen’, while Praetorius (1618) included them among the ‘kleine Poschen’; he used the diminutive ‘Rebecchino’ for a violin. From the 16th century onwards the rebec was often called by the various names of its offshoot, the Kit.
The vaulted back of the rebec is generally carved from one piece of hard wood and the instrument tapers in such a way that there is often no visible distinction between the body and the neck. The fingerboard, when one exists, is a raised part of the narrowing soundboard or is fixed to it from above (sometimes with a wedge as on early violins), but this does not change the frontal outline of the instrument. It is thought that early rebecs had no soundpost, but soundposts are found on similar instruments made since the Renaissance, such as the Bulgarian gadulka and the Greek lira. The design of the soundholes, peg-holder, pegs, tailpiece or other string-holder, bridge, strings and bow varied during the Middle Ages, presumably according to the function the instrument was to perform, and on the same lines as the medieval Fiddle. As on the fiddle, the bridge was either flat, so that all the strings could be sounded together, or else made in such a way that each string could be bowed separately. If the bridge was not curved, other devices included grooves for the strings being set at different levels, or studs of different heights set into the tailpiece, as can be seen in fig.1.
In the first four centuries of its history there were two main types of rebec (see figs.1 and 2): the completely wooden pear-shaped instrument terminating in a flat peg-holder (similar to the modern Greek lira), and the skin-bellied, narrower instrument with its right-angled pegbox (the latter may be the ‘rabé morisco’, mentioned by the 14th-century writer Juan Ruiz in his poem El libro de buen amor, which has survived in the rabāb of North Africa). While continuing their separate existences, both contributed to the traditional type of European rebec that appeared in the late 13th century and became established in the 14th. This type, occasionally fretted, was approximately pear-shaped, with a wooden soundboard, a sickle-shaped pegbox, usually ending in a scroll or carved head, and a tailpiece (fig.3). It seems to have coincided with the general appearance of the word ‘rebec’, and may have been that type of ‘rebecum’ which, according to Tinctoris, was invented by the French. Meanwhile experiments continued, and the right-angled pegbox, hitherto used mainly in southern Europe, now spread to the north.
Just as the shape varied, so did the size of the instrument and the number of strings. Although the average was three, any number from one to five was quite usual; occasionally there were more. Sometimes they were grouped in pairs, each pair tuned to one note, and a lateral drone was not unusual before 1300 (see fig.4. Instruments of the rabāb type seem to have kept on the whole to two strings which, according to Hieronymus de Moravia, were tuned in 5ths, to c and g (or notes relative to those). Aimeric de Peyrac indicated a high pitch by comparing the sound of the rebec to women’s voices (‘Quidam rebecam arcuabant muliebrem vocem confingentes’) in his poem Lamentacio cantorum (see Bec, 1992, p.139). The Italian poet Simone Prodenzani referred in a sonnet of c1400 to ‘rubebe’, ‘rubecchette’ and ‘rubicone’, suggesting three different sizes of rebec. In 1532 Hans Gerle gave tunings for ‘kleynen Geigleyn’ in four sizes. These were notated in a type of German lute tablature and the pitches were unspecified; Downie (1981) has suggested the following: discant g–d'–a', alto and tenor c–g–d' and bass C–G–d–a. Agricola’s tunings of 1545 were specified as discant g–d'–a', alto and tenor c–g–d' and bass F–G–d–a. This last example shows that tuning only in 5ths cannot have been universal; indeed, those rebecs that had three or more single strings sounding together needed a tuning suitable for regular drones. As the medieval fiddle was often tuned in 5ths, 4ths and octaves, and possibly also the pear-shaped but plucked gittern, it seems reasonable to assume that this tuning may sometimes have applied to the rebec as well. Many continental representations show instruments which could have been plucked or bowed, but this rarely occurs in English iconographical sources.
From the time of their appearance, there has been a tendency for instruments of the rebec family in southern Europe and northern Africa to be played down in the lap, with the bow gripped from below. This is clearly seen in the Cantigas de Santa María manuscript (see fig.2) and in the Psalter of Alfonso V of Aragon (GB-Lbl Add.28962, f.82r; see fig.5). However, Giovanni di Nicola’s Virgin and Child Enthroned (Museo di S Matteo, Pisa) is one of several pictures where rebecs of the rabāb type are played up at the shoulder. It seems that the latter position was usual in northern Europe, the downward position in the south; also that in the north the strings were pressed down by the fingers and in the south they were touched from the side by the fingernails. However, such generalizations reflect only tendencies and not fixed rules, and everywhere there was considerable variety in the manner of performance. The downward position seems to have been virtually unknown in England.
Of the few rebecs which survive from the Middle Ages, one typical of the lira type was excavated in Novgorod on the site of a house which was destroyed by fire in May 1368, and is now, together with fragments of other such instruments, in the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow (see Crane, 1972, p.16 and fig.11). Other rebec-type instruments survive in museums but they are mainly either later imitations and forgeries or folk instruments. (These are described by Downie, 1981, as are former ‘rebecs’ now believed to have been plucked.)
Although for some time bowing was not fully accepted in the higher social circles of Asia, it was widely adopted in Europe after the bow’s establishment there in the 10th and 11th centuries. Instruments of the rebec family were deemed by Romanesque artists worthy to be played by the Elders of the Apocalypse and by David’s minstrels, and at the Portada de las Platerias at the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela David himself is depicted playing one. During the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the rebec was a recognized instrument of professional minstrels who, dressed in special livery, played in royal courts or were attached to a town or noble household. Such was the rebec player carved on the Minstrels’ Pillar at St Mary’s Church, Beverley, Yorkshire, during its rebuilding after the tower collapsed in 1520. In the Knight of La Tour Landry (before 1450) the ‘ribible’ is referred to as one of the instruments ‘as longithe to a mynstralle’.
In rustic society the rebec was prominent at village revels, and as such can be seen carved, together with a pipe and a horn, round a 14th-century window in St Mary’s Church, Lawford, Essex. While wind instruments were more usual in the fields, the undated French poem Bellefoiere describes the ‘hoarse rebec of the cowherds’ being played with the bagpipes. Its bucolic associations are many. In Lydgate’s Pilgrimage of the Life of Man people are taught ‘to revelle at taverne on rebube and on symphonie’, while in Langland’s Vision of Piers Plowman Gluttony goes into a tavern and finds there ‘a rybibour and a ratoner, a rakere and hus knave’. In 1628 Parisians were forbidden to play any form of violin in taverns, but the rebec was allowed to remain, and it was still known in such situations in the 18th century.
Processions, whether sacred or secular, often included rebecs. The 14th-century Tickhill Psalter shows David, holding the head of Goliath, being escorted by musicians singing and playing two rebecs, a citole, fiddle and four trumpets (fig.6). Gentile Bellini’s Procession of the True Cross in the Piazza S Marco (1496) shows two groups of musicians, one playing trumpets, shawms and sackbuts, and the other, nearer to the Cross, playing a rebec, lute and harp (see Chorus (i), fig.3). In 1536 the mystery play Les actes des apôtres at Bourges was preceded by a parade round the town: one of the floats represented Heaven, and on it were ‘two … little angels, singing hymns and canticles, who joined with players of flutes, harps, lutes, rebecs and viols, walking around Paradise’. A painting (1615) by Alsloot of a float in an ommegang procession at Brussels shows the Muses playing a lute, harp, viola, rebec (? or kit), flute, ?cittern, bass violin, triangle and tambourine, while Apollo plays a harp (see Brussels, fig.1).
The use of rebecs at feasts, dances and entertainments of the nobility has been widely documented. Johannes de Garlandia listed the ‘giga’ among other instruments to be seen in the houses of rich Parisians in the 13th century. Edward I had among his minstrels three gigatores from Germany, who took part in the celebrations at Westminster on Whitsunday 1306. The French poet Eustache Deschamps wrote that ‘at royal courts everyone wants to play the trumpet, gittern and rebec’.
At the court of Henry VIII rebec players (listed in the accounts) included John de Severnacke, Thomas Evans and Great Guilliam, and the types of occasion on which they played were described by court scribes and visiting foreigners; these included a feast where, according to the Venetian visitor Sagudino, ‘in the centre of the hall there was a stage on which were some boys, some of whom sang, and others played on the flute, rebeck and harpsichord’ (see Stevens, 1961). In the Revels Accounts of 1513 Richard Gibson described a pageant he had produced. Called the ‘Ryche Mount’, it was an elaborate replica of a mountain, decorated with symbolic plants (such as broom for Plantagenet) and drawn into the hall by two ‘myghty woordwossys or wyld men’. Six minstrels stood on it, playing rebecs and ‘tambourines’ (probably pipes and tabors in this context) while lords and ladies descended from it to dance. At the wedding in Florence in 1539 of Cosimo I, Duke of Florence, to Eleonora of Toledo, the elaborate intermedi ended with the appearance of 20 bacchantes, eight of whom played disguised instruments, one being a stag’s head containing a ‘ribecchino’. When Mary Queen of Scots returned to Edinburgh from France in August 1561 and was trying to sleep, ‘five or six hundred scoundrels of the town serenaded her with wretched violins and small rebecs, of which there is no lack in this country; and they began to sing psalms than which nothing more badly sung or out of tune could be imagined’ (Brantôme; see Boyden, 1965, p.59).
The rebec dates from the period when music was seldom written for specified instruments but was played on whatever was available and suitable for the occasion, and although it survived into the Baroque era it did not at that time normally appear in art music. This apart, the earlier ways in which it was used are broadly those described for the medieval fiddle; it was particularly used for dance music and the accompaniment of songs. From the 16th century onwards several pieces of music specify rebecs of different sizes. Gerle left pieces in four parts, based on German songs, to be played on a whole consort of ‘kleynen Geigleyn’ (reproduced in Downie, 1981, pp.547–50). Florentine carnival songs include the Canto di lanzi sonatori di rubechine (reproduced in McGee and Mittler, EMc, 1982). This describes German mercenaries in Florence playing the small ‘rubechine’, which were held on the arm, could be played while dancing and gave a sound of ‘divine sweetness’, and the ‘rubechaze’, which were played on the knees and were therefore too large for their performers to dance at the same time. The rebec’s appearance in a broken consort is exemplified by the above-mentioned piece from the Florentine wedding. Composed by Corteccia in four parts to the words ‘Baccho, Baccho, e u o e’, its voices would have been doubled by the instruments (probably playing divisions), and as the rebec was a small one it may have played the top line.
Certainly the music played on the rebec depended to a great extent on the tone of each individual instrument, and as there was no standardization of structure each one’s sound must have been very different. Indeed, this is evident not only from modern reconstructions but also by comparison of the ‘hoarse rebec’ in Bellefoiere with the instrument described by Tinctoris:
And I am similarly pleased by the rebec, my predilection for which I will not conceal, provided that it is played by a skilful artist, since its strains are very much like those of the fiddle [‘viola’]. Accordingly, the fiddle and the rebec are my two instruments; I repeat, my chosen instruments, those that induce piety and stir my heart most ardently to the contemplation of heavenly joys. For these reasons I would rather reserve them solely for sacred music and the secret consolation of the soul, than have them sometimes used for profane occasions and public festivities.
MGG1 (M. Bröcker)
PraetoriusSM, ii
VirdungMG
M. Agricola: Musica instrumentalis deudsch (Wittenberg, 1529/R, enlarged 5/1545; Eng. trans., ed. W. Hettrick, 1994)
H. Gerle: Musica teusch (Nuremberg, 1532/R, rev. 3/1546/R as Musica und Tabulatur)
D.J. Rittmeyer-Iselin: ‘Das Rebec: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte unserer Streichinstrumente’, Festschrift Karl Nef (Zürich and Leipzig, 1933), 210–19
A. Baines: ‘Fifteenth-Century Instruments in Tinctoris’s De inventione et usu musicae’, GSJ, iii (1950), 19–26
H.H. Carter: A Dictionary of Middle English Musical Terms (Bloomington, IN, 1961/R)
J. Stevens: Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court (London, 1961, 2/1979)
R. Rastall: ‘The Minstrels of the English Royal Households, 25 Edward I–1 Henry VIII: an Inventory’, RMARC, iv (1964), 1–41
D.D. Boyden: The History of Violin Playing from its Origins to 1761 (London, 1965/R)
A.C. Minor and B. Mitchell, eds.: A Renaissance Entertainment: Festivities for the Marriage of Cosimo I, Duke of Florence, in 1539 (Columbia, MO, 1968)
M. Remnant: ‘The Use of Frets on Rebecs and Mediaeval Fiddles’, GSJ, xxi (1968), 146–51
M. Remnant: ‘Rebec, Fiddle and Crowd in England’, PRMA, xcv (1968–9), 15–27; xcvi (1969–70), 149–50
F. Crane: Extant Medieval Musical Instruments (Iowa City, 1972)
A. Rooley: ‘The Problem of Double Bridges on 15th-Century Illustrations of Rebecs’, Fellowship of Makers and Restorers of Historical Instruments: Bulletin and Communications, no.2 (1975), 2–3
C. Page: ‘Jerome of Moravia on the rubeba and viella’, GSJ, xxxii (1979), 77–98
L. Wright: ‘Sculptures of Medieval Fiddles at Gargilesse’, GSJ, xxxii (1979), 66–76
M. Downie: ‘The Modern Greek Lyra’, JAMIS, v–vi (1979–80), 144–65
M.A. Downie: The Rebec: an Orthographic and Iconographic Study (diss., U. of West Virginia, Morgantown, 1981)
M.A. Downie: ‘Rebec in French Literary Sources from 1379–1780’, JVdGSA, xix (1982), 71–98
T.J. McGee and S.E. Mittler: ‘Information on Instruments in Florentine Carnival Songs’, EMc, x (1982), 452–61
B. Ravenel: Vièles à archet et rebecs en Europe au Moyen Age (diss., U. of Strasbourg II, 1982)
B. Ravenel: ‘Rebec und Fiedel: Ikonographie und Spielweise’, Basler Jb für historische Musikpraxis, viii (1984), 105–30
I. Woodfield: The Early History of the Viol (Cambridge, 1984)
C. Page: Voices and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Instrumental Practice and Songs in France, 1100–1300 (Berkeley, 1986)
M. Remnant: English Bowed Instruments from Anglo-Saxon to Tudor Times (Oxford, 1986)
B. Ravenel: ‘De l'iconographie musicale à la reconstitution des vièles et des rebecs’, Musique ancienne, xxii (1987), 51–84
M. Remnant: Musical Instruments: an Illustrated History from Antiquity to the Present (London, 1989)
A. Baines: The Oxford Companion to Musical Instruments (Oxford, 1992)
P. Bec: Vièles ou violes? Variations philologiques et musicales autour des instruments à archet du Moyen Age: XIe–XVe siècle (Paris, 1992)
M. Remnant: ‘Medieval Musical Instruments’, Medieval World, no.7 (1992), 30–40
P. Holman: Four and Twenty Fiddlers: the Violin at the English Court 1540–1690 (Oxford, 1993, 2/1995)
C. Page: Music and Instruments of the Middle Ages: Studies in Texts and Performance (Aldershot, 1997)
C. Rault: ‘Iconographie et reconstitution: … la vièle ovale’, Des instruments pour les musiques du Moyen Age, Cahiers de musique mediévale, ii (Paris, 1997)
J. and G. Montagu: Minstrels & Angels: Carvings of Musicians in Medieval English Churches (Berkeley, 1998)
Instruments à cordes du Moyen Age: Royaumont 1994 (Grane, 1999)
M. Remnant: ‘Musical Instruments in Early English Drama’, Material Culture & Medieval Drama, ed. C. Davidson (Kalamazoo, MI, 1999), 141–94
For further bibliography see Fiddle.