As argued by Alberto Sanna in this EMP, common conceptions of how to approach the performance of a core seventeenth-century repertoire, namely the instrumental music of Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713), deserves closer scrutiny.
He points out a continued tendency to apply conventions associated with eighteenth-century performance practice, which acts as a kind of one-size-fits-all “Baroque” performance style.
The nomenclature on the title page of Corelli’s Op. 5 Sonate a violino e violone o cimbalo has been noted and discussed before (for instance by David Watkin in “Corelli’s op. 5 sonatas: ‘violino e violone o cimbalo’?”, Early Music, 24/3 (1996), 645–63).
Sanna takes the matter a step further by drawing attention to the way Corelli’s collection belongs to the repertoire of seventeenth-century Italian duos, in which parts for instruments whose function was to provide harmonic support (harpsichord, theorbo), were usually provided separate from the string bass.
However, there remains a reluctance to take on board the conclusion that Corelli intended this music for violin and violoncello duo, or for violin and harpsichord as a second option (the term violone was used to indicate an 8-foot string bass instrument tuned to C-G-d-a).
Provocatively, we could attribute this to the way the discipline is structured, since professional lives continue to thrive on specialism in “Baroque” music, and all that entails from the point of view of marketing, and how music is taught in universities.
(Andrew Woolley, 2014)