A bowed string instrument. Although in modern usage the term refers to a six- or seven-string instrument of the Viol family often called Viola da gamba, in the 18th and 19th centuries in the USA and occasionally in Britain ‘bass viol’ meant a four-string instrument tuned in 5ths like a cello. It was probably a shortened version of the term ‘bass violin’. Such instruments were of two kinds: the first like a cello except for certain local constructional details, the second of larger body size but with the same string length and fingerboard as a cello, with a short neck (accommodating playing only up to the second position without recourse to thumb positions). Instruments of both kinds were occasionally made with five strings, but no contemporary instruction book refers to the practice or indicates the tuning. The large-sized instruments are called ‘church basses’. Certain archaisms in construction reflect earlier European building techniques, the commonest being an f-hole in which small connecting bridges of wood are left at the turns, a groove or channel routed in the wood of the back and belly into which the ribs were fitted and glued, and the use of a foot-like extension of the neck block (almost always integral with the neck itself) projecting into the body and fixed to the wood of the back by a butted glue joint and a screw. A peculiarly American feature is the use of plank-sawn wood in the belly and back, giving the instruments a curious florid appearance; but the best makers used quarter-sawn wood according to traditional European practice.
From the late 18th century up to the mid-19th there was an active American industry in the manufacture of these instruments, probably created partly by the demand for bass instruments to accompany the church choirs which had been relieved of their Puritan obligation to perform unaccompanied. By the 1830s there were makers specializing in the production of bass viols; over 35 are known to have been working in New England in this period. The earliest known maker was Crehore of Boston, who is reported to have made his first bass for a local music master in 1785; he made basses of both sizes. The most prominent and prolific was Abraham Prescott, who made his first instrument in 1809. The popularity of the instrument declined around the time of the Civil War, partly because the pipe or reed organ had superseded it in church music.
F.R. Selch: ‘Some Moravian Makers of Bowed Stringed Instruments’, JAMIS, xix (1993), 38–64
FREDERICK R. SELCH