Viola da Gamba Society of America

Dear GiA Committee,

We are pleased to be able to ask for your support in putting on the conference “The Spirit of Gambo: the state of viol research,” to be held March 15–17, 2024 at the University of California Berkeley and organized by David Miller and Zoe Weiss.

The three-day conference will involve individual papers sessions and lecture-recitals, a keynote address by the prominent early modern musicologist and amateur viol player Kate van Orden (Dwight P. Robinson Jr. Professor of Music at Harvard University), open viol consort playing sessions, and a conference dinner. The conference is also putting on a concert, organized by Elisabeth Reed, that will feature many different viol repertories: from solo playing to consort music, song, and contemporary works. In addition to Elisabeth, many other Bay Area viol players will participate (Josh Lee, Farley Pierce, Julie Jefferies, and David Morris). The Pacifica Chapter has graciously agreed to “host” the concert and will be providing a post-concert reception. We’ve also received significant support from the UC Berkeley music department who are paying for the flight and honorarium of our keynote speaker and contributing around $2000 towards the event, in addition to letting us use their facilities free of charge and hosting a reception following the keynote address.

It has been a long time since there has been an academic conference that focuses on research specifically related to the viol. Certainly, there has been no such event since the Pan-Pacific Gamba Gathering in 2007. We believe that such a conference is both exciting and necessary. Scholarship about the viol cuts across many traditional disciplinary boundaries, touching on work in organology, music theory, historical musicology, ethnography, composition, and more. By centering the viol, we hope to bring such diverse methodologies into productive conversation with one another, fostering the cross-pollination of ideas that is so inspiring to researchers. By highlighting the viol’s place in this scholarly nexus, we also hope to stimulate new research into the viol, its repertoire, and its cultures of playing.

We have arranged with John Moran for the very best papers from the conference to be published as a special issue of the Journal of the Viola da Gamba Society of America. We are excited that this will get more excellent scholarship about the viol into print, as well as supporting the careers of our contributing scholars via publication. The call for papers has been sent out (a PDF is included in the application materials), and we have received a good number of submissions already, as well as expressions of interest from many viol players and scholars.

While this conference is of deep academic interest to both of us, we also see our role in organizing it as a service to the larger viol-academic community and are delighted to be able to offer this forum to viol scholars both established and up-and-coming. Conferences are about the papers presented, but they are also crucial venues for networking and laboratories for ideas. To support these secondary objectives, we have scheduled a conference dinner and several receptions in order to actively foster these necessary informal social interactions. We also think it’s important to center our love for the viol and its repertoire to our work and have also scheduled a consort playing session as a highlight of the conference. Instruments will be provided from UC Berkeley’s collection and from Pacifica members (who are also invited to join in the consort playing).

We are well-placed to put this conference together successfully, both in our scholarly/musical backgrounds and our institutional positions. Both David and Zoe received their PhDs from Cornell University, where both were active in leading the Cornell Viol Consort and the Cornell Baroque Orchestra. Both of us also perform regularly on the viol. David is an Assistant Professor of Practice in the Department of Music at UC Berkeley, where he has co-taught a course on beginning viol with Elisabeth Reed. Together, they started 18 new viol players this year, many of whom have continued playing after the end of the course. David’s research straddles many centuries, encompassing topics such as the American reception of Anton Webern and overlaps between modernist and early music reception and performance practice. Zoe is an Assistant Professor of Musicology at the University of Denver’s Lamont School of Music where she also runs a viol consort and a Baroque orchestra. Her dissertation offered a new narrative for understanding the early In Nomine, focusing on the networks of musicians who cultivated the form. She has published work on English consort music and her current research project is an ethnography of the VdGSA that explores the role of the organization in American amateur music making. Both David and Zoe’s academic positions come with some allocated research funds that have allowed us to go ahead with organizing the conference before raising all the money required, knowing we can draw on these if needed. However, the more outside support for the conference we can find, the more we can save these limited funds for upcoming archive visits, travel to conferences, and other research expenses. A GiA award from the VdGSA would provide both critical financial support for this endeavor and also, just as importantly, signal the VdGSA’s commitment to promoting scholarship about the viol.

Both of us are long-time VdGSA members and Zoe spent two terms on the Board as well as serving for several years on the website committee during the creation of the new website. The total cost of the conference is around $7,100 and we are asking for the VdGSA to contribute $1,500. You can see the full budget in a separate submitted document.

We hope you share our excitement about this event and hope very much for your help in producing it.

All Best,
Zoe Weiss & David Miller