ABSTRACT
It is extremely important for everyone studying the conventions of performance in the late Middle Ages to connect particular instruments with repertories of music, for otherwise we neither refine our ideas about how earlier music actually sounded nor learn how instruments could actually have been played. The problem is especially urgent now that there is a challenge to the notion that musical instruments regularly accompanied secular polyphony. It is especially important to understand clearly the role of the fiddle in the late Middle Ages, since it was the workhorse among musical instruments, the equivalent in flexibility and diversity of the lute in the 16th century or the piano in the 19th century. Johannes de Grocheo, writing in Paris about 1300, seems to say as much when he claimed that the fiddle was an instrument capable of playing every imaginable form and style of music. 1 Jerome of Moravia, writing at about the same time and in the same place, seems to confirm Grocheo’s view of the importance of stringed instruments by devoting the last chapter of his treatise instructing his fellow Dominicans in the rudiments of chant and polyphony to the tuning and ranges of the two-stringed rebec and the five-stringed fiddle. 2 Jerome gives several alternative tunings for the fiddle. Two seem to imply the use of drones; they would be appropriate if the instruments were intended to be used to play chords or a melody accompanied by chords. 3 A third tuning, d–G–g–d′–g, with all the strings running over the fingerboard, is described by Jerome as ‘necessary for secular songs and for all others—especially irregular ones—which frequently wish to run through the whole hand’. 4 This tuning was intended, in other words, for playing melodies, and especially for those with a large compass. Although he does not explicitly say so, Jerome seems to imply that the instrument tuned in this way could sound its single strings individually; it was capable of playing almost the entire gamut, lacking only the top e″.
