Ferrabosco

The lyra viol is the perfect instrument for self-isolation, and so I’ve been exploring Ferrabosco’s 1609 publication. The date caught my attention because Shakespeare published his Sonnets in the same year. And then I noticed that Ferrabosco had dedicated his publication to The Earl of Southampton, someone who has often been suggested as the object of the first part Shakespeare’s work. Here’s a recently re-attributed painting of the young Earl, previously thought to be an unidentified girl - “the master mistress of my passion” as Skaespeare says.

I’ve spent a week on each tuning. I don’t have a dedicated instrument and can’t borrow one now (of course), so I take the 7th string off my Jane Julier Bertrand copy, and tuned it to the first tuning: 3rd string up a semitone, 5th & 6th down a tone. Last week was the 2nd tuning, a little more difficult: top two strings up a semitone from the first tuning. But now the third tuning is the most extreme, and I have had to replace the top two strings with thinner ones and gone up a further semitone. So I have arrived at (from the bottom at A=440) BEBEBE. It is eerily bright, sweet and resonant. The music is wonderful, but difficult, especially the Galliards.