MAA 1:1 Music for Solo Viola da Gamba from Williamsburg, Virginia (c. 1735): Free Download

The two suites and two cæbelles (cybelle/cibell) for unaccompanied six-string viola da gamba from colonial Virginia bring to light a unique aspect of musical culture in the Greater Atlantic British New World. Bound in a manuscript inscribed "Musick Song Book, 1738" (MSB) circulating in Williamsburg, Virginia since at least the 1730s, these pieces, along with a set of keyboard works, are among the earliest known musical sources connected to the Chesapeake Bay. The largest portion of this repertory constitute the only known gamba compositions found in American source material of the eighteenth century. Although European settings of the cæbelles survive from England, the suites remain a new source for gamba literature and provide a link between practices of the late Restoration Period in Great Britain and its subsequent galante revival during the Georgian period in the hands of Carl Friedrich Abel.