(It.).
An 18th-century name given to a bowed string instrument, possibly a cello or a smaller variant of it, played at shoulder height with the instrument held across the player's chest by a strap over the shoulder (It. spalla).
Zaccaria Tevo (1706) mentions the viola da spalla as an instrument that plays bass parts in an ensemble. Musicians from the Veneto, such as Tevo, frequently referred to the bass member of the violin family as a viola, and his viola da spalla is probably an equivalent of the violoncello da spalla mentioned by Bartolomeo Bismantova, who gives its tuning as D or C, G, d, a. Johann Mattheson followed Tevo's usage, but added considerable detail – including the playing position and the use of a strap to keep the instrument in place – in his account of the viola da spalla, which he described along with the violoncello and bassa viola as a small bass violin. J.F.B.C. Majer, Museum musicum (1732), added that the viola da spalla, taken now as an equivalent of the cello, may also be held between the legs. Jacob Adlung, Anleitung zu der musikalischen Gelahrtheit (1758), simply equated the viola da spalla with the cello.
Iconographic evidence – formerly taken as bizarre or incompetent renditions of violins or violas – confirms the use of a shoulder-held cello during the period reported by these writers. An illustration in the cello music of Giuseppe Torelli's Concertino per camera op.4 (1688), for example, shows a standing figure with just such an instrument. Significantly, the engraver of this publication, Carlo Buffagnotti, was himself a cellist who held the rank of suonatore in the Accademia Filarmonica of Bologna.
See Violoncello, §II, 1(ii); and Bass violin.
B. Bismantova: Compendio musicale (MS, 1677, I-REm); facs. ed. (Florence, 1978)
Z. Tevo: Il Musico testore (Venice, 1706/R)
J. Mattheson: Das neu-eröffnete Orchestre (Hamburg, 1713/R)
G. Barnett: ‘The Violoncello da Spalla: Shouldering the Cello in the Baroque Era’, JAMIS, xxiv (1998), 82–107
GREGORY BARNETT