Old Ground

LAURA VAUGHAN (B.1978)
1) THE VELVET DEEP

WILLIAM CORKINE (FL.1610s)
2) WHOOPE DOE ME NO HARME GOODMAN from Ayres, Book 1

RICHARD SUMARTE (FL.1630s)
3) NONESUCH from The Manchester Gamba Book X-4

ANON (MID-1600s)
4) THE SPANISH PAVAN No 34 from The Mansell Lyra Viol Book

ANON (MID-1600s)
5) JEMMYE from The Manchester Gamba Book IV-7

ANON (MID-1600s)
6) MUST YOUR FAYRE No 1 from The Mansell Lyra Viol Book

SIMON IVES (1600-1662)
7) GILLIE-FLOWER from The Manchester Gamba Book XII-20

ATTRIBUTED TO R. SUMARTE
8) ROBEN IS TO THE GREENSE-WOODE GON from The Manchester Gamba Book I-4

JOHN PLAYFORD (1623-1686)
9) THE MAID'S RANT No 75 from Musicks Recreation on the Viol, Lyra-Way

S. IVES
10) LA CLOCHE from The Manchester Gamba Book XII-11

W. CORKINE
11) PRELUDE
12) CORANTO
13) IF MY COMPLAINTS 
14) THE PUNCKES DELIGHT
from Ayres, Book 2

R. SUMARTE
15) DAPHNE from The Manchester Gamba Book I-6

BROOKE GREEN (B.1964)
16) THE SPIRIT OF DAPHNE 

STEPHEN GOODALL (FL.1660s)
17) UNTITLED

R. SUMARTE
18) FORTUNE from The Manchester Gamba Book I-3

S. GOODALL
19) UNTITLED from The Manchester Gamba Book I-8

W. PLAYFORD
20) FAREWELL FAIR ARMIDA No. 17 from Musicks Recreation on the Viol, Lyra-Way, Part 2

TOBIAS HUME (C.1569-1645)
21) A SNATCH AND AWAY from Musicall Humors

JOSEPH SHIRLEY (FL.1607-1610)
22) UNTITLED from The Manchester Gamba Book III-9

ANON (MID-1600s)
23) PRELUDIO AND LANCA-SHIRE PIPES from The Manchester Gamba Book VII-1 & VII-2
24) LANCA-SHIRE PIPES MEDLEY: Kate of Bardie, Pigges of Rumsey, A Toye, Untitled from The Manchester Gamba Book VII-3 to VII-6

ALICE CHANCE (B.1994)
25) OLD GROUND

FL. = flourished

LAURA VAUGHAN VIOLA DA GAMBA, BARYTON [Track 1]

DONALD NICOLSON HARPSICHORD [Track 25] 

HAIG BURNELL PRODUCER

Recorded at St Mark’s Anglican Church Fitzroy 12-15 July 2021 & 1 December 2025

Albert Comper Photography

At the heart of this recording is the sound of the viola da gamba: an instrument whose warm, resonant voice has inspired composers for more than four hundred years. Old Ground brings together music from seventeenth-century England with three new Australian works that continue this tradition, each responding to the distinctive sound world of the viola da gamba. Alongside these works is a single composition for baryton, a close relative of the viola da gamba whose unusual combination of bowed and sympathetic strings adds another dimension to the programme.

Although separated by centuries, the music on this recording is connected by a shared fascination with resonance, variation and the expressive possibilities of these instruments. The seventeenth-century composers represented here explored the viola da gamba’s colours through inventive tunings, intricate counterpoint, dances, arrangements of popular melodies and freely developed variations. The contemporary works continue this spirit of exploration, approaching the instruments not as historical artefacts, but as living voices capable of inspiring new music.

The title Old Ground reflects several ideas that run through the recording. It refers to the historical repertoire at the centre of the programme, to the Baroque practice of the repeating ground bass, and to Alice Chance’s title work, which was inspired by the ancient materials of the earth itself. More broadly, it suggests the way musical ideas are carried forward: inherited, transformed and given new life by each generation of composers and performers.

THE ENGLISH LYRA VIOL

The foundation of this recording is the remarkable solo repertoire for the English lyra viol. The term lyra viol does not specifically describe a different instrument, but rather a distinctive approach to playing the viola da gamba that flourished in England from the late sixteenth century through the seventeenth century.

Unlike consort music, where groups of viols performed together, lyra viol repertoire was most commonly written for a single player, combining melody, harmony and accompaniment within one instrument. The music encompasses an extraordinary range of styles: dances, pavans, song arrangements, divisions on popular tunes, preludes, character pieces and highly contrapuntal works. Some pieces are elegant and restrained, while others are playful, unusual or technically adventurous.

One of the defining features of the lyra viol tradition is its use of tablature rather than conventional staff notation. Tablature graphically shows where the player places the fingers on the strings rather than indicating the sounding pitches directly. This made it possible to move between different tunings while retaining familiar physical patterns beneath the fingers.

More than fifty surviving lyra viol tunings are known today. Each creates its own particular sound world, shaping the instrument’s harmonies and physical possibilities—sometimes quite radically. Different tunings also alter the tension of the strings: higher tunings with greater tension produce a brighter, shining quality, while lower tunings bring greater warmth and resonance. Some tunings encourage rich chords and ringing open strings; others allow particular melodic shapes or divisions to fall naturally under the hand. This physical relationship between the player and the instrument is one of the most fascinating aspects of the repertoire. Working from tablature, players encountered music not only as a series of pitches, but as patterns of movement across the strings. Familiar shapes under the fingers produced different harmonies when the instrument was retuned, encouraging composers to think through the possibilities of the instrument itself. In this sense, the construction and tuning of the viol became part of the composition. The repertoire preserved in this tradition reflects this freedom and imagination. A familiar melody might be transformed through elaborate divisions; a simple dance might become a sophisticated study in harmony; a popular song might be reshaped into an expressive solo work. The composers represented on this recording shared a fascination with what the viol could do: its ability to sustain several musical lines at once, to combine melodic and harmonic roles within a solo performance, and to reveal new colours through its varied tunings and resonance. 

THE SOURCES

Much of the surviving English lyra viol repertoire comes from a small number of manuscripts and printed collections from the seventeenth century. These sources do more than preserve individual compositions; they reveal a musical culture in which professional musicians, skilled amateurs, composers and copyists all contributed to a flourishing tradition.

The largest source represented on this recording is the Manchester Gamba Book, one of the most important collections of lyra viol music. Compiled during the middle decades of the seventeenth century, it contains more than 250 pieces organised according to tuning. This arrangement reflects the practical experience of players: once an instrument had been retuned, a musician could explore a group of works sharing the same harmonic landscape before moving to another tuning and another set of possibilities.

The manuscript includes music by named composers including Richard Sumarte, Simon Ives and Joseph Sherlie, alongside many anonymous works. The mixture is significant. The lyra viol tradition was not built solely around famous composers, but through a wider culture of musical exchange in which pieces circulated, were copied, adapted and reimagined.

The Mansell Lyra Viol Book provides another glimpse into this world. Probably compiled for domestic use, it contains dances, pavans and popular melodies, reflecting the important role of music-making in the home. The printed collections of William Corkine, published in 1609 and 1612, offer a different perspective. Best known as collections of songs with lute and viol accompaniment, Corkine’s Ayres also contain some of the earliest printed examples of solo lyra viol music.  The later publications of John Playford, particularly Musick’s Recreation on the Viol, Lyra-Way, show that the tradition continued to flourish throughout the second half of the seventeenth century. Playford’s collections were intended for accomplished amateur players as well as professionals and helped preserve a repertoire that remained popular even as musical styles changed.

Taken together, these sources reveal a tradition shaped by experimentation and exchange. The music is not a fixed historical monument, but the record of musicians continually discovering new possibilities within the instrument. That same process of discovery continues in the new works on this recording.

A LIVING TRADITION

The three contemporary works on this recording were written independently of one another, yet each connects with aspects of the historical repertoire that surrounds them. They do not seek to recreate seventeenth-century music, but instead respond to ideas that have long been central to the viola da gamba tradition: variation, improvisation, the transformation of existing material, and an exploration of the instrument’s distinctive resonance.

Each composer approaches the viola da gamba family from a different perspective. One work responds to the physical qualities of the baryton and its unusual combination of bowed and sympathetic strings; another reimagines a seventeenth-century melody through a contemporary musical language; the third draws on a Baroque compositional practice to reflect on questions of time, memory and the natural world.

Together, these works show how the distinctive qualities of the viol family, including the warmth of its sound, its vocal character, and its rich capacity for resonance, continue to inspire composers across generations. 

THE VELVET DEEP

The Velvet Deep is the only work on the album for baryton, an instrument closely related to the viola da gamba. Like the viol, it has bowed gut strings, but beneath these lies a second set of fine wire strings that resonate sympathetically as the instrument is played. These strings add a distinctive shimmer to the sound and can also be plucked with the thumb of the left hand while the bow continues to sound the upper strings, creating a unique combination of bowed and plucked resonance.

The piece grew from an illustration in Peter Van den Ende’s wordless book The Wanderer, which follows the imagined voyage of a small paper boat across the ocean. The image that inspired this work shows the tiny white boat floating on calm, dark water, with fish rising from below, their glowing eyes mirrored by a sky filled with stars. 

The stillness and sense of scale in this image stayed with me. As I looked at it, the ancient Marian hymn Ave Maris Stella (“Hail, Star of the Sea”) came to mind, and gradually became the musical foundation of the piece.

Rather than presenting the hymn as a complete melody, I wanted fragments of it to appear and disappear within the changing resonance of the baryton. The instrument’s sympathetic wire strings create a sound that continues beyond the initial gesture of the player, a resonance that, to me, feels like waves, while the plucked strings add another layer of movement and colour.  These qualities suggested the slow undulation of water and the shifting reflections of light across the surface of the sea.

The work is not intended as a musical illustration of the image itself, but as a response to the feeling it created: a sense of wonder at the relationship between something small and fragile, and the vastness of the world surrounding it.

THE SPIRIT OF DAPHNE

Brooke Green’s The Spirit of Daphne takes as its starting point Richard Sumarte’s setting of Daphne, one of the more recognisable melodies in the English lyra viol repertoire and a work included in the Manchester Gamba Book.

In seventeenth-century England, popular melodies were often treated as material for invention. Composers created divisions, variations and new settings of tunes that listeners already knew, using them as foundations for exploration rather than fixed compositions to be reproduced. Green’s work continues this tradition, responding to Sumarte’s Daphne in a similar spirit.

The title also refers to the mythological figure Daphne, who escapes Apollo’s pursuit by being transformed into a laurel tree. Green’s work reflects the complexity of Daphne’s character through contrasts of register, texture and playing technique. Rapid changes between high and low registers, harmonics, pizzicato and bowed passages suggest different aspects of the figure behind the myth.

Rather than quoting Sumarte’s music directly, The Spirit of Daphne allows traces of the earlier work to inform a new composition. The relationship between the two pieces mirrors the broader relationship between the historical and contemporary works on this recording: an ongoing conversation in which older ideas become the starting point for new ones.

OLD GROUND

Alice Chance’s Old Ground, from which the album takes its title, brings together viola da gamba and harpsichord. Donald Nicolson joins me in a performance that draws on the relationship between written composition and improvisation that has always been central to Baroque music.

The work began during a composition project while Chance was living in Paris, where she was given the chance to spend time with geologist Dr Mathieu Roskosz at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle. She writes:

“Among other objects, I remember being awestruck by the famous Météorite d’Orgueil as well as a large sample of a Pallasite meteorite with hundreds of olivine crystals suspended in a metallic matrix. It resembled a stained-glass mosaic set in a mirror; half reflective, half see-through. In Mathieu’s laboratory, he told me stories of expeditions to far away deserts to collect fragments of meteorites and showed me large pieces of equipment used to cut samples and analyse their chemical composition.

In my favourite room, there were two large filing cabinets, each with many thin flat drawers that slid out and showcased stunning meteorite samples, some etched with criss-cross patterns of iron, others resplendent with fragments of crystals suspended in metal. I held one meteorite that had come from Mars. I remember, as I felt the weight of that rock in my hand, the sense of awe that descended on me. Here I was, a tiny human, holding a rock that had journeyed millions of kilometres further than I ever would, that had been alive long before any human and would remain long after us, and that had felt the cold of outer space and the burning of Earth’s atmosphere. This Martian rock’s lifetime made mine look like an invisible speck.

In the laboratory there was a wealth of data. I had an instinct to use it to derive musical motifs, whether it was the coordinates of where a sample was found, or the amount of observable crystals within its makeup. At one point, I wanted to create a musical Pallasite, in which two motifs were smashed and marbled together like in Pallasite meteorites. However, as I worked, I felt that nothing was doing justice to the awe I felt while holding these ancient, majestic pieces of ground.

It came to me quite by accident the idea of an improvisation on a ground bass, but when it arrived, I knew that this was what the piece had to be. The ground bass, popularised in the Baroque period, is a repeating bass line over which melodies are played and elaborated upon, often in an improvised fashion. A famous example is Henry Purcell’s Dido’s Lament (‘When I am laid in Earth’) from Dido and Aeneas. The English play on words suited me very well, exploring the concept of an ancient piece of ground whilst using the, albeit far less ancient, technique of a ground bass.”

The title Old Ground refers both to this musical form and to the ancient materials of the earth itself. Throughout the piece, the repeating bass provides a foundation while the viola da gamba and harpsichord develop a constantly changing conversation above it. The harpsichord part is substantially improvised, drawing on the practice of Baroque continuo playing. In this tradition, the performer realises and embellishes a harmonic framework rather than simply reproducing a fixed accompaniment. This approach brings an element of spontaneity to the work, allowing the relationship between the two instruments to develop differently in each performance.

Chance continues:

“Beyond that, I wanted to explore the natural resonance of the viola da gamba, as well as allowing enough freedom so that the players can inhabit the work. What has resulted is a reverent meditation on the dizzying moment when you realise the ground you are touching is unfathomably wiser than you will ever be.”

Like much of the historical repertoire on this recording, Old Ground balances structure and freedom. A simple musical foundation becomes the basis for continual variation, while the natural resonance of the viola da gamba allows sounds to overlap and linger. The result is a meditation on time, memory and perspective, connecting a centuries-old musical practice with a contemporary reflection on the ground beneath us.

LISTENING TO OLD GROUND

The music on this recording spans more than four centuries, yet many of the same ideas appear throughout the programme. Familiar melodies are transformed through variation; repeated bass lines become foundations for invention; different tunings reveal unexpected colours within the same instrument. These connections reflect a tradition in which composers and performers have continually responded to existing material, finding new possibilities through imagination and experimentation.

The seventeenth-century repertoire represented here ranges widely in character. Alongside refined contrapuntal writing are dances, popular tunes, song arrangements and pieces that seem to delight in the personality of the instrument itself. Some works invite close attention to intricate detail, while others reveal a direct and immediate pleasure in rhythm, melody and resonance.

Many of the melodies would have been familiar to seventeenth-century listeners. Daphne, later reimagined by Brooke Green, was a popular tune that inspired numerous settings. Other works preserve traces of everyday musical life: Gilliflower, The Maid’s Rant, Robin is to the Greenwood Gone and Lancashire Pipes all suggest connections with songs, dances and traditions beyond the music room.

The anonymous works on the recording sit naturally alongside pieces by named composers such as Richard Sumarte, William Corkine, Simon Ives, Tobias Hume and Joseph Sherlie. Together they remind us that the lyra viol tradition was not shaped only by celebrated figures, but by a much wider community of musicians who copied, performed and adapted this repertoire.

One of the enduring pleasures of this music is the way it rewards close listening. The details are often small but significant: an open string continuing beneath a melody, a familiar tune transformed through variation or subtle decoration, the unexpected colours created by an unusual tuning, or the resonance of sympathetic strings continuing after the initial sound has been made.

These qualities are central to the appeal of the viola da gamba family. The instruments invite a close relationship between player and sound, where gesture, touch and resonance all become part of the music. The composers of the seventeenth century understood this, and the contemporary works on this recording continue that conversation.

Old Ground brings together music from different centuries not as a contrast between past and present, but as a continuation of a living tradition.

-Laura Vaughan