The hardiest tale about the viola d'amore concerns not the thing itself but the name. The whole d'amore business. 'D'amore', you see, is said to be a corruption of da mori or de'mori. ('of the Moors').
Sounds exotic, right? Practically does the work for you.Gives the whole enterprise a whiff of the caravanserai.
Name game strong.
Proponents of this theory gesture with barely suppressed excitement at the flame-shaped sound holes found on certain instruments. These, they assure us, all wide-eyed, constitute irrefutable proof of eastern influence, being supposedly evocative of scimitars, of the flame of distant Eastern fires, of mysterious connections to lands beyond the sunrise.
It's an enchanting narrative which possesses all the trimmings modern sensibilities crave: exotic pedigree, cultural cross-pollination, a bit of East meetin’ West in harmonious congress, the implicit rebuke to European provincialism, that sort of thing.
One almost feels churlish for noticing the evidence appears to be rather thin on the ground.
Rachael Durkin (who made a proper, no-bollocks study of these matters) takes this Moorish hypothesis out for a quiet walk.
She notes flame-type sound holes have been retrospectively designated 'flaming swords' in reference to Islamic art and the Persian shamshir. A dash of Arabian Nights, sprinkled over what is otherwise a fairly pedestrian bit of lutherie.
But this 'appears to be nothing more than an attempt to explain unusual design elements in tandem with the instrument's supposed Eastern origins.'
Geigen of Agricola
And Virdung
When Europe Discovered It Could Orientalise Anything
The theory of Eastern origins finds its feet in the nineteenth century, which, for anyone familiar with that era's scholarly habits, ought to raise an eyebrow. This was, after all, the century which brought us phrenology and various other confident assertions that have not, shall we say, worn the years especially well.
François-Joseph Fétis, in his Historie Générale de la Musique back in 1869 more or less lobs the idea into the room like, 'Yeah, this instrument came from India, and while we’re at it, the baryton did too', and they supposedly meandered through the Middle East to Istanbul, yadda yadda. India being conveniently far away has long served as a sort of scholarly blank cheque: distant enough that one needn’t encumber oneself with tiresome verification.
Fétis describes La kemângeh roumy as a generic term covering various instruments with different forms and tunings.
The version he discusses has twelve strings total: six gut string passing over the bridge like European bowed instruments, and six brass sympathetics running through holes in the bridge and attach under the tailpiece. He notes the tuning is reversed from the viola d'amore: the lowest strings are on the right side of the neck instead of the left.
It sounds right, okay?
If you want the French for full scholarly gravitas 'n shit...
La kemângeh roumy est plus en rapport avec les conditions normales des instruments à archet que celles dont il vient d'être parlé. Le nom de kemângeh roumy est générique, et s'applique à des instruments divers de forme, d'étendue, d'accord, et même vraisemblablement d'origine. Villoteau n'a décrit qu'un de ces instruments, dont la forme est analogue aux produits de la lutherie européenne, et qui, dit-il, tient le milieu entre le violon et l'alto. Le système de monture et d'accord appartient à celui de la viole d'amour, dont l'usage s'est conservé en Bohême et dans la Hongrie. La kemângeh roumy de ce genre analysée par cet écrivain est montée de douze cordes, dont six, de boyau, passent sur le sillet, sur le manche et sur le chevalet, pour aller s'attacher au cordier, à la manière des instruments à archet de l'Europe. Les six autres cordes sont en laiton; le cheviller, percé à jour pour leur livrer passage, a une légère ouverture sur la touche par où elles passent pour aller traverser le chevalet par de petits trous, percés au centre, et s'attacher sous la queue du cordier. L'accord de cette kemângeh roumy est l'inverse de celui de la viole d'amour, en ce que les cordes les plus graves sont à la droite du manche au lieu d'être à la gauche.
Now, on the sarungie, or sârangî,Fétis really lights up. He claims to have solved the mystery of where the viola d'amore and baryton came from. He argues: Indian instruments like the sarungie, toumourah, and chikâra had sympathetic strings, and that groove traveled from India through Persia, made a pit stop in Turkey. From there rolled into Hungary via Wallachia and Serbia.
Or as he put it...
Ici se produit la solution d'une question souvent posée sans qu'on eût trouvé de réponse satisfaisante. On demandait quelle avait été l'origine de la viole d'amour et du baryton, instruments à sons harmoniques montés de cordes de boyau jouées par l'archet et de cordes métalliques placées sous la touche et le chevalet, et résonnant par sympathie harmonique. Ces instruments, connus dès la fin du dix-septième siècle dans la Hongrie et la Bohême, eurent plus tard une certaine vogue en Allemagne et ont été cultivés avec succès par des artistes distingués. La viole d'amour était aussi connue antérieurement à Constantinople, où on la trouve encore. Il paraît que c'est de cette ville que l'instrument a pénétré en Hongrie, par la Valachie et la Servie; mais d'où était-il venu dans la capitale de la Turquie? Il ne paraît pas qu'il puisse y avoir de doute après avoir vu ce que sont les sarungies de l'Inde, dont le principe se retrouve dans la toumourah de Dehli et dans la chikâra de Bénarès; il paraît, dis-je, hors de doute que la viole d'amour et le baryton sont nés de ce principe de résonance par sympathie harmonique qui de l'Inde a passé en Turquie par la Perse.
Danks write in 1957:
The flaming-sword soundholes of the viola d'amore lend support to this theory, the flaming sword being the symbol of Islam.
Danks, it seems, was chill about the minor detail that there is, in fact, no established flaming sword lurking anywhere as a primary symbol of Islam. Minor quibble.
Eugène de Bricqueville's La Viole d'Amour (1908) introduced the Moorish origin theory more explicitly.
His dilemma is chronological: if Praetorius informs us the English were stackin' sympathetic strings in 1620, yet Attilio Ariosti is out there in London, circa 1715, jammin’ on an instrument 'unknown in England.' One can almost hear him sigh, and indeed, he eventually does. Hands thrown up, the origin of the viola d’amore proving, as ever, devilishly hard to pin down.
Harry Danks's 1979 book The Viola d'Amore, the first comprehensive English study, embraced this theory with enthusiasm.
When Elizabeth I granted a Royal Charter to the east
India Company in 1500 for trading purposes with
India, routes unknown before were opened up and
contacts made with all walks of life in the new
continent. This also brought contact with Turkey,
Persia, and other Eastern countries, so it is not
inconceivable to believe that musical instruments also
travelled back to England, in company with silks and
spices. The range of Middle Eastern instruments
possessing sympathetic strings is large and complex,
demanding specialist detailed study to appreciate and
understand their influence on western instruments.
Hayes 1930 deals with the early viol and its relation to
the Arabic instruments of 1600 onwards, and points to
the development of the viol from this source. This theory has been a popular one. Fetis thought that
viola d'amore derived from the Arabic instrument "Kemangeh roumy" (Kamanza rumi).
The theory proved remarkably durable. American string pedagogy was still repeating it over a century later: Robert Dolejsi's 1970 article in American String Teacher suggested the 'viol de Moor' etymology remained 'a theory of some importance,' casually mentioning 'oriental instruments' with sympathetic strings as if proximity of design proved transmission of influence.
As late as 1995, the American String Teacher was still confidently informing its readers 'scholars think the idea for it might just possibly have come west with the spice trades in the seventeenth century, making it a cousin of the Arabic Kemangeh roumy.'
France, Paris. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, NAF 1892 f.77
Why the Myth Persisted
The viola d'amore myth didn't emerge in a vacuum. It belongs to a long European tradition of orientalising its own musical past in what we might call temporal exoticism.
The pattern began (no it didn't. But I'm gonna start here) with the eighteenth-century turquerie...
After the Ottoman defeat at Vienna in 1683 and the Treaty of Karlowitz in 1699, a newly-safe Europe developed a taste for exoticism. Rameau's Les Indes Galantes (1735) presented four 'exotic' locales including Turkey and Persia; Mozart gave us 'Rondo alla Turca.'
But nah, maybe the pattern didn’t start there either.
It began with Molière's Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670), featuring its famous mock-Turkish ceremony. The exotic appeal existed even when the Ottomans remained a genuine military threat.
Then you got things like Indonesian culture influencing France, for example in the Wayang shadow plays which were performed at Le Chat Noir.
One might pause here to appreciate the full absurdity of fin-de-siècle Paris's orientalist layer cake. Consider Gaston Leroux's Phantom of the Opera (1910), wherein Erik (our titular phantom) is presented as an architect trained in the exotic arts of Persia, a master of Eastern illusion and the sinister 'Punjab lasso.' This character, steeped in vaguely Ottoman mystique, demonstrates his cultural sophistication by referencing Poe's The Masque of the Red Death, whose Prince Prospero is himself named after Shakespeare's Prospero, that most colonial of magicians, performing his arts on an exotic island while subjugating the native Caliban.
Anyway, this turquerie fondness merged with style hongrois, the romanticisation of Romani music from Hungary, Transylvania, and Serbia. The augmented second became sonic shorthand for otherness, whether 'Hungarian Gypsy, Turkish and Arabic music'. As Bence Szabolcsi noted, Hungarian and gypsy dance tunes were incorporated into Viennese 'Turkish' compositions since they utilised many of the same 'exotic' devices, despite Hungary having been part of the Ottoman Empire until 1699, making these influences thoroughly European by the eighteenth century.
The twentieth-century early music revival inherited this orientalising impulse and gave it scholarly legitimacy.
The theory's persistence owes much to the early music revival's romance with 'unbroken traditions.' As documented in John Haines's 2001 article 'The Arabic Style of Performing Medieval Music,' the 1970s and '80s saw performers eagerly incorporating what they termed 'Arabic style' ornamentation into medieval repertoire. An instrument with genuine Moorish pedigree would have been a prize specimen. Tangible proof East and West had mingled in ways that justified their performance choices. Small wonder, then, the theory proved so resistant to mere facts.
It is no coincidence the term ‘world music’ was coined in the 1960s at the same time as the early music revival and new musicology were in their infancy. The term is credited with the ethnomusicologist Robert E. Brown, but it would be two decades later, in 1987, when record producers in London conceived of world music as a marketing term following the success of Paul Simon’s Graceland. In this case ‘world music’ existed as a marketing tool, much the same as ‘authentic’ early music did.
As Michael Morrow observed in 1973, the early music revival movement had developed what Thurston Dart memorably called 'knitting your own middle ages', the practice of manufacturing historical performance conventions from whole cloth when actual evidence proved inconveniently scarce or absent. The problem was fundamental: without surviving oral tradition, performers faced what Morrow termed 'countless possibilities of interpretation.' A single medieval piece could be played in a dozen different ways, yielding what would 'almost certainly appear to be twelve quite different pieces of music.' One might, by sheer chance, approximate historical practice, but 'how are we now to judge which?'
The solution was to import performance practices from elsewhere, with geographically distant cultures serving as imaginative proxies for temporally distant ones. Morrow noted the reasoning: traditional musics 'throughout the world' and folk survivals might reveal 'traditional techniques of instruments our own society has forgotten about.' The logic was seductive. If notation couldn't preserve performance style, and if European tradition had been irretrievably lost, why not look to cultures where oral tradition still flourished? The Balkans offered epic ballads sung at weddings by 'the descendants of the medieval minstrel.' North Africa and the Middle East presented instrumental techniques European classical training had abandoned. The problem, as Morrow recognised, was this created 'a fundamental confusion: are we studying actual historical transmission (rebab to rebec), or using geographically distant cultures as imaginative proxies for temporally distant practices?'
Richard Taruskin's 1982 article 'On Letting the Music Speak for Itself' says what performers heard as 'authentic' medieval or baroque sound invariably reflected contemporary musical culture rather than historical accuracy. The viola d'amore's supposed Eastern origins emerged not from seventeenth-century evidence, but from twentieth-century desires, the same impulse that led ensembles to perform Machaut with quasi-Arabic ornamentation and, as Edward Jones noted in 2002, to use a Tunisian rabāb in Binkley's Schola Cantorum Basel recording of the medieval Spanish Cantigas de Santa Maria (Harmonia Mundi, 1980).
The Moorish origin theory functions less as history than as what Medieval scholars term 'Medievalism', the creative reimagining of the past for present purposes. Such recreations often involve what scholars describe as 'temporal exoticism,' trading imaginative travel in time for travel in space. The viola d'amore didn't need to actually come from the East; it needed to seem like it could have, to satisfy modern listeners' expectations of what the past should sound like.
Edward Jones's 2002 account of ensemble tours to Morocco and the Middle East in the 1960s reveals the process in action: performers heard oriental music on tours through Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Lebanon, incorporated its sounds into 'medieval' performances, then retrofitted historical instruments with Eastern origins to justify the aesthetic choices they'd already made. Jones himself wondered 'how far oriental influences pushed to northern Europe,' noting 'at present almost all ensembles of medieval music would seem to think' that medieval instruments like those carved in relief on St. Jakob church in Regensburg necessarily produced 'completely oriental' sounds. The cart had been hitched firmly before the horse.
Less Exotic, More Interesting
Durkin takes the revolutionary approach of consulting primary sources and examining surviving instruments. The viola d'amore, she demonstrates with exhaustive documentation, is a seventeenth-century European invention. Once a humble five-string wire-strung viol, it later sprouted a sixth string (a breakthrough first noted by Curt Sachs in 1940). Her research singles out north German manufacture and use, supported by the customary mountain of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources, including iconography and surviving instruments.
Michael Praetorius, writing in 1619 with characteristic Teutonic thoroughness, described the viola bastarda as having sympathetic strings added by English makers. English makers. Not Moorish craftsmen. Not mysterious Eastern artisans. English makers, in England.
John Playford's 1661 preface to Musicks Recreation on the Viol, Lyra-Way attributes the creation of a related instrument to Daniel Farunt/Farrant, not to be confused with Farinell, named after Faronells Division on a Ground.
Farunt, says Playford, designed a viol with lute strings and wire strings arranged so sympathetic strings vibrated beneath the main strings. We have his name. We have the date. We have the description. This is documented history.
A Linguistic Tangent
As recounted at the Second International Viola d'Amore Congress in 1984, when Vazgen Muradian introduced the viola d'amore to Armenia in 1954, he discovered no term for the instrument existed in the Armenian language. This proved rather inconvenient for a concert programme. Armenia, one notes, sits squarely along the route Fétis confidently traced from India through Persia to Turkey and thence to Europe. If the viola d'amore had indeed travelled this path westward, one might reasonably expect to find some linguistic trace of its passage through the region. Instead, Muradian was obliged to improvise, coining the term 'siro joot' (love viola) by grafting the word for love onto the existing Armenian term for viola. The instrument arrived in Armenia not as a returning native, but as a complete stranger from the West, requiring translation. This is not how instruments behave when they're heading home.
An Inconvenient European Precedent
The Baryton (viola di bordone), favoured at the Habsburg court during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, featured sympathetic strings. As documented by Durkin, a 1609 London patent granted to Peter Edney and Georg Gill covered 'the sole making of violles violins and Lutes w[i]th an addic[i]on of wyer strings beside the ordinary siringes for the bettering of the sound': evidence European experiments with sympathetic strings were already underway in the early seventeenth century.
The viola d'amore's development from this tradition was more complex than a simple inheritance. Early references to the instrument describe wire-strung viols without sympathetic strings: John Evelyn's 1679 account mentions 'a viol d'Amore of 5 wyre-strings,' while Jean Rousseau (1687) and others describe similar instruments. Durkin argues a transition occurred in the early eighteenth century, with luthiers converting existing wire-strung viols by replacing wire playing strings with gut, while adding metal sympathetic strings, often by attaching them via metal tuning pins to existing peg boxes.
The modern viola d’amore is, in short, a Frankenstein's monster of the string world, assembled from various bits of baroque whatnot: gut strings cribbed from the viol tradition, sympathetic strings nicked from the baryton, and that famously saccharine resonance produced by gut politely agitating metal into vibration. Its closed neck sets it apart from the baryton, whose open construction allowed the player to prod the sympathetic strings with the left thumb.
Bricqueville argues early descriptions (Mersenne, Praetorius) describe plucked metal strings, not sympathetic resonance. The metal strings were touched by the thumb to sound deliberately, not vibrating sympathetically.
This European lineage shows how sympathetic strings got cooked up in them luthier labs across multiple instrument types. Whether these experiments were entirely independent of Eastern influence or represented European adaptations of observed acoustic principles remains an open question, but the documentary and physical evidence traces a clear path through German and Austrian workshops of the seventeenth century.
The absence of romance in this narrative need not disqualify it. Howard Mayer Brown, writing in memoriam for David Munrow, acknowledged the problem: 'Historical relationships between medieval instruments and folk survivals can surely never be established. The justification for studying folk instruments (and non-Western instruments) in this connection is that they teach us traditional techniques of instruments our own society has forgotten about.' But this creates a fundamental confusion: are we studying actual historical transmission (rebab to rebec), or using geographically distant cultures as imaginative proxies for temporally distant practices?
The actual history is compelling precisely because it reveals how instruments develop through practical iteration rather than mythic inspiration.
Renaissance and Baroque instruments frequently bore symbolic decorations. Where flame-shaped sound holes appear, they can be interpreted in many ways that have nothing whatsoever to do with the east. The viol family itself provided the complete framework for introducing sympathetic strings to European bowed instruments in the seventeenth century, well before the viola d'amore emerged as a distinct instrument.
The whole 'Moorish origin' theory is a confused mess:
If it's about the etymology (d'amore = da mori), that would point to North Africa/Iberia.
If it's about sympathetic strings, that supposedly came from India/Persia/Turkey.
These are completely different regions and cultural spheres.
As Maria Todorova noted, making Ottoman 'synonymous with Islamic or Turkish (or Arabic and Persian) influences' was a 'defining hallmark of nineteenth-century Balkan nationalist projects.' The viola d'amore myth performs the opposite function: it makes a thoroughly European instrument 'synonymous' with a vague, undifferentiated 'East' to serve twentieth-century multiculturalist anxieties.
If the instrument were truly celebrating Islamic influence, one might wonder at the decorative choice of a blindfolded Cupid, that most European of cherubic figures. It would be like naming one's mosque 'Saint Peter's.'
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