The Piccolo Violin is one of the instruments that hailed from the Baroque (18th century and earlier) era of music that has long fallen into disuse and in modern Classical ensemble/orchestral settings, the Piccolo Violin is to all intents and purposes, extinct. For most modern Classical groups, the Piccolo Violin part is often just covered and transposed for a normal Violin, which detracts from the intended sound world and purpose of the original composer's composition. A regular violin can play the same notes as the Piccolo Violin, but it will sound very different, due to the larger construction and lower tuning of the modern Violin equivalent.

However, the field of Early Music specialists attempt to revive the use of these long lost instruments, in a conscious decision to recreate the sound world and context of the original compositions from the Baroque era. To understand why the Piccolo Violin existed in the first place and to understand the reasons for it's eventual decline in the intervening centuries, one must look further back into the history of the Violin family of instruments.

Before the Violin

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Before the dominance of the Violin family of instruments in the String sections of Classical Music, there existed another group of instruments. These were known as the Viols (or Viola da Gambi), of which the only modern survivor is the Double Bass. These Viols continued the tradition at the time of having matched sizes of of instruments (known as consorts) with different physical sizes and tunings that defined the part that they would play in the consort. In the video below, you can see a consort that is made up of (from high to low): 2 treble viols, 2 tenor viols, a lyra and a bass viol.

_{An example of a Viol Consort}

The idea was that all the instruments would be playing in their best register that was defined by it's physical size (which was defined by the Physics of Acoustics), namely that the smaller the instrument the higher the pitch. Thus, if you wanted a higher pitch, you had a smaller instrument, rather than traversing down the fingerboard of a larger instrument (which produced the same note, but a different quality of sound). Likewise, if you wanted a lower sound, then you had an instrument with a corresponding large body, which allowed for a longer string length, thus producing a more bassier sound.

Consorts of viols were of varied sizes, and compositions for them required differing numbers of voices at different pitches. Thus, there was no standard "set" of viols. However, in his book Musick's Monument (1676), the music theorist Thomas Mace suggests that a "good" size for a chest of viols was:

"six in number, 2 Basses, 2 Tenors, 2 Trebles, all truly proportionally suited"

It was quite common for wealthy families of the time to own various matched sets of instruments (be they matched viols, lutes, recorders or otherwise). A Consort was a grouping of such matched instruments of the same type, whereas a "broken" consort would consist of unmatched instruments such as a viol, a recorder and a lute. It was always considered better to have a matched consort, as this would result in a more harmonious and blended sound, but if you could not afford a matched set, then a "broken" consort would have to suffice. I have included two addition videos, one of a matched wind consort and another of a "broken" consort.

_{An example of a Recorder Consort An example of a Broken Consort}

The Violin Family

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So, this was the context in which the early Violin family developed at the end of the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. Long before the standardisation of the Violin family into the modern triplet of Violin, Viola and Cello; the consort idea of musical instruments still held sway. Thus, the Violin family consisted of many more members, of which the Piccolo Violin was the highest sounding (and thus the smallest physically) of the family. Other instruments that have fallen away were the tenor Viola/Violin (a viola that is tuned below the modern viola, and is significantly larger, although still held like a Violin), the bass Violin (which was larger than the Cello and tuned lower again) and the Violone (the largest in size of the family). There are existing examples of these instruments, however many of them were lost or "converted" over the intervening centuries as the drive for standardisation continued. For instance, there are many examples of the bass Violins in existence, but the had been irreparibly cut down to a more manageable cello playing size.

The Piccolo Violin

In the image above, you can see the comparison in size of the Piccolo Violin (top) compared to a normal sized Violin (bottom). It is noticeably smaller, in body length as well as string length, which means that it can support a much higher pitch at the same string tension compared to the regular sized Violin. The higher pitch means that it is much better suited to playing soprano lines, which would require position shifting on the regular Violin, which whilst not being difficult, makes for a completely different sound quality.

The tuning of the Violin (from low to high) is B flat - F - C - G, which is a minor third higher than a "normal" Violin, generally if a "normal" Violin was tuned this high, it would result in many broken strings and possibly damage to the body and bridge of the instrument due to the markedly higher string tension (and thus, the force downwards onto the body via the bridge). However, there was not a single standard tuning, and there is evidence that the instrument could go even higher in pitch(a fourth was not uncommon).

The best preserved existing copy from the Baroque/Renaissance era of a Piccolo Violin is an Amati construction, which is currently held at the National Music Museum, in Vermillion, South Dakota (United States). However, we have documentary evidence of the existence of the violin, in addition to specific composer instructions for parts that are written for a Piccolo Violin. For instance the composer/theorist Michael Praetorius, in his Syntagma musicum II: De organographia mentioned the Piccolo Violin in an incredibly offhand way:

“[s]ince they are such familiar instruments I need not say much more about them….”

... and we have compositions that specifically ask for the instrument by name (Piccolo Violino) by composer such as: : Karl Ditters von Dittersdorf, Johann Friedrich Doles, Philip Heinrich Erlebach, Christoph Förster, Johann Joseph Fux, Johann Gottlob Harrer, Johann Gottlieb Janitsch, Krause, Johann Pfeiffer, and Rosetti. This is in addition to the two most famous examples of composition for the instrument by JS Bach (Brandenburg Concerto #1) and Monteverdi (Orfeo).

Brandenburg Concerto #1

Facsimile Score available at IMSLP

By far and away the most famous composition for the Piccolo Violin is the First Brandenburg Concerto by JS Bach. Scored for 3 oboes, 2 horns in F, Piccolo Violin Solo and Strings and Continuo, this is the first concerto from the epic Brandenburg set of concerti. A set of six Concerti that showcase the various instruments from the Baroque era that were composed specifically for Christian Ludwig, Margrave of Brandenburg-Schwedt in 1721. As a measure of how important these concerti were to Bach, he copied these concerti by his own hand, instead of entrusting the work to a copyist.

In a modern setting, the Piccolo Violin is often replaced by a "normal" Violin playing the correct notes. However, this substituting takes much away from the original intend and sound world of the composition.

I hope this has been an informative and somewhat interesting journey into the past history of the Violin family, to bring to light a little known (and mostly unplayed) member of the Violin family, the little baby Piccolo Violin!