With gently sloping shoulders, held between the musician’s knees, noticeably smaller than a modern cello, yet with many more strings, the baryton must be one of the strangest string instruments ever designed. A cousin of the Baroque viol, what sets the baryton apart is an extra set of strings running along the back of its wide fretboard, resonating alongside the bowed strings in front. Geared toward ambidexterity, players can pluck these secondary strings with their left thumb, with the rest of the left hand working the fingerboard – all while bowing with the right.
The baryton had its heyday in 17th- and 18th-century Europe, bolstered by a repertoire of compositions by Joseph Haydn. Haydn’s baryton trios showcase the instrument’s soft, light tone alongside a cello and viola, embodying the elegance of classical chamber music. Earlier compositions from the Baroque period illustrate the baryton’s ability to act as its own accompanist, with a bowed melody floating above plucked notes – like a sparse partnership between viol and lute or harpsichord.
But the baryton is finicky, and its intricacies may explain why it fell out of fashion. As well as its knotty playing technique, they’re also harder to tune and manufacture than their sister instruments in the string family. Yet no instrument is dead as long as someone, somewhere is playing it. The baryton still has its fans, both among amateur enthusiasts and revival groups like the Valencia Baryton Project, whose repertoire includes new works commissioned in the 21st century. The main barrier to entry is practical: How to get one’s hands on such a niche instrument?
The baryton is not an instrument you can buy new off the rack, so to speak. Lesser-known historical instruments are typically made to order by specialists, requiring a skillset combining technical expertise with artistry and archival research. Historical luthiers must reach back through the centuries to revive half-forgotten artifacts with no standardised design.
English instrument-maker Owen Morse-Brown is one such craftsman, specialising in bowed instruments from the Renaissance and Baroque periods.
“I grew up playing a lot of early music, and also learning woodwork skills in my dad’s workshop,” he explains when we speak by phone. He started making instruments as a teenager, developing his skills through practice and professional study. Overlapping with the philosophy behind historically informed performance, this career requires both imagination and investigative legwork, fuelled by a passion for the tangible side of history. After lying dormant for centuries, how can we discern what a baryton or a medieval vielle sounded like in its original environment? What was life like for the people who built, played and listened to them?
“I’m very interested in the social side of it,” Morse-Brown says, noting that luthiers in the past benefited from a lineage of hands-on expertise, most of which was never written down. “There’s so much inherited knowledge that they wouldn’t even think about.” That knowledge continued to be passed down for popular instruments like the violin, but for more obscure instruments, “the tradition has gone and we’re trying to recreate it.”
When accepting any new commission, Morse-Brown’s first task is research. He inspects antiques in museums and private collections, and studies whatever written texts are available. But once you go earlier than 1700 or so, “we don’t have any plans or instructions of how things were made.”
Complicating matters further, there’s also no such thing as a perfectly preserved original source. Gut strings snap. Wood deteriorates. When an instrument has been played, stored and displayed for hundreds of years, mends and alterations are unavoidable. Reconstructing the “original” is a matter of educated guesswork. And once you delve further back to the renaissance or medieval periods, “you’re really only looking at images, possibly carvings in churches, woodcuts.”
Morse-Brown’s creations often involve more ornamentation than we’re used to seeing in modern string instruments, which “really goes with the period, especially the Baroque, when things were very ornate and decorated.” His portfolio is full of fingerboards inlaid with intricate patterns, and carved scrolls featuring animals or human faces.
In part that’s because his customers are dropping considerable amounts of money on unique works of art – but the original sources are also a factor. Most modern reconstructions are based on specific antique instruments, and for obvious reasons, “the very special looking instruments are the ones that have been preserved.” The more basic examples are lost to time.
After the research stage, the next step is selecting the right materials. “A lot of it is very similar to woods that are used in violin-making, which has a much stronger tradition of retained knowledge,” says Morse-Brown. “So I can source material from violin makers’ suppliers.” That said, luthiers in the past had to work with whatever was available.
“If I can use local woods, I think it gives the instrument a bit more of a personal feel and it’s more in line with how things might have been. And you perhaps get a bit more variety of sound as a result.” He often experiments with fruit woods like pear, cherry and plum. Even more old-school, “If I come across a nice tree being cut down, I sometimes try and get hold of it and dry it myself.”
Similar to other bowed instruments, the baryton utilises hardwoods for the back and sides, and softwoods for the front. Its six or seven main strings are typically tuned like a bass viol, while the resonating strings are tuned to a D major scale. Morse-Brown explains that most classical baryton music is composed in the key of D, creating “a sort of natural reverb.”
From a luthier’s perspective, making a baryton is a particularly tricky undertaking. In addition to the dearth of originals to work from, there’s a very real possibility that the instrument might implode during the construction process. The sheer volume of strings – sometimes as many as 22 – creates an immense amount of internal tension. Some Baroque versions actually include a metal bar reinforcing the neck. Then there’s the careful calculations required for the double-sided nature of the strings. “You have to get the neck at exactly the right angle, otherwise strings will hit against the front or the underside of the fingerboard.”
The final touches are among the most stressful. On a violin or cello, there are four strings spread over the front of the fretboard, supported by a single bridge. On a baryton, things are much more complicated. The fretboard is raised an extra inch or so above the front of the body, creating space for the resonating strings to pass through a hollow chamber in the neck. Below the arc of the bowed strings, they run from the thumb side of the fretboard and out over the flat plane of the body, secured by individual bridges on the front panel. Each bridge must be glued on by hand – and each one runs the risks of snapping its strings, damaging the completed instrument.
“It’s certainly very involved, especially with all the decoration,” Morse-Brown admits. “It’s quite an intense process. I remember one of the Baroque ones that had 16 plucked strings and 6 bowed strings, and it was quite an emotional experience to actually play it after so much work had gone into building it.”
If not for Haydn and his patron Prince Nikolaus I of Hungary, the baryton would be even more obscure today. A notoriously big spender in every area of life, Nikolaus Esterházy’s legacy is closely intertwined with Haydn’s, funding a colossal number of compositions during Haydn’s 30-year tenure as musical director of the Esterházy’s court orchestra.
This prolific period allowed Haydn to develop the skills that led him to international fame. But he was still an employee, and that meant working to some rather specific demands. As an obsessive baryton player, Prince Nikolaus commissioned over a hundred works for his favourite instrument. Most were trios, designed for the Prince to play alongside friends or court musicians in private. Today, these Haydn trios represent the bulk of the baryton’s classical repertoire.
Even in the 18th century, the baryton wasn’t exactly popular. Morse-Brown describes it as “a player’s instrument.” The reverb from its sympathetic strings is subtle, mostly heard by the musician themself – a concept that fits the image of a wealthy hobbyist commissioning music to play for his own pleasure. Haydn was essentially composing for an audience of one: in a system of aristocratic patronage, that’s how you pay the bills.
Likewise catering to the Prince’s sensibilities, Haydn worked around the technical complexity of bowing, plucking and fingering all at once. “A lot of the music written for it by Haydn is quite cleverly written so that you’re not generally doing both at the same time,” Morse-Brown points out. “You’re bowing and then plucking, intermingling the two things. It sounds very complicated and it obviously takes a special skill to do it, but perhaps not quite as difficult as it might seem.”
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