Treatises

It was not until the end of the seventeenth century that instruction books devoted exclusively to violin technique were published, John Lenton's The Gentleman's Diversion … (1693) being recognised as the first extant violin tutor. Like most of its immediate successors, it was intended for the amateur musician. Its elementary content was no substitute for oral instruction by a teacher, on whom many depended in order to learn techniques ‘which may be knowne but not described’. Earlier in the century some treatises had begun to reflect both the liberation of instruments from their subordination to the voice and the improved social position of the violin itself by incorporating descriptions of contemporary instruments, sometimes with some basic technical information. But these were publications addressed to musicians as a whole, dealing with a wide range of instruments, and were not specialist violin texts. Among the most significant of these ‘multi-purpose’ volumes were Praetorius's Syntagma musicum (1618–20), Mersenne's Harmonie uni verselle (1636), Zanetti's Il scolaro … per imparar a suonare di violino, et altri stromenti (1645), Prinner's Musicalischer Schlissl (1677), Speer's Gründ-richtiger … Unterricht (1687) and Falck's Idea boni cantoris (1688). John Playford's A Brief Introduction to the Skill of Musick demonstrates the increasing popularity of the violin in amateur circles, a complete section, ‘Playing on the Treble Violin’, being added in a second revised edition (1658) published four years after the first.