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The Viol: History of an Instrument.

Article Excerpt
By Annette Otterstedt. Translated by Hans Reiners. Kassel: Barenreiter, 2002. (Revised and enlarged edition of Die Gambe, Kulturgeschichte und praktischer Ratgeber [Kassel: Barenreiter, 1994]). [262 p. ISBN 3-7618-1151-9. 34.90. [euro] Music examples, illustrations, color plates, diagrams, bibliography, index.

Professional musicians who are also professional musicologists are a fairly rare breed and likely to remain so. Quite apart from the philosophical reasons for the separation, which go back far indeed--the divide between theory and practice is inscribed in Western culture with a depth that we ignore at our peril--there are also good practical reasons. Despite the obvious and vital connections between fields, maintaining real credentials in either is a life's work in itself; doing both bespeaks a forbidding aspiration for overachievement. Perforce, most performer/scholars end up located in one camp, making more of less convincing occasional excursions into the other. On the whole, these individuals, like all boundary crossers, do much to enrich the scope of both regions they inhabit. But they also tend to draw tire from both sides.

Without knowing Annette Otterstedt's training and professional affiliations--she does not offer any in her book--I conclude that she has primarily located her career in the world of performance, writing this book about her instruments an excursion into scholarship. I would hazard to say this in part because the book is not just a history, as its English title implies; it is also a practical manual, as the more informative original German title tells us. Otterstedt speaks authoritatively and in detail about matters of technique, style, and instrument maintenance, something one had better not do without extensive practical experience. My conclusion results also from the kind of occasional potshots at musicology that are altogether too easy to find among performers--even, alas, the kind of highly educated performer that she herself clearly is. Thus we have in her introduction.

Th[is] book addresses those readers who would like to learn something...

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