Musical angels in Mölten st. George
In a teeny tiny church, two musical angels, and one is playing a big violin
The first time we entered what had to become our home, we fell in love with the view from the south terrace: a hill with a couple of houses and a tiny church. That view compromised for the fact that it was a flat with no garden, and I imagined myself going there every day to walk the dog. We went to live here in 2014, and since then, I have gone to the field just below the church every day with my dog, and now and then we post a picture of that view.
The church is dedicated to St. George, and I have read on Wikipedia that on that site they also found some Celtic graves, which seemed to be a pretty noticeable historical background for the place I see every morning when I look at the weather. I continued to take pictures almost every day, with every light, in every season, but I didn’t investigate further.
During the last few months, I made friends with a Lutheran pastor from Philadelphia on Instagram, and he draws every evening to find some each before going to bed. Lately, he got into drawing churches, mainly small wooden churches from wintery Russia. He asked me if I could provide him with pics of some small churches in these surroundings, and I thought my first had to be of that church. So I decided to go there and take some close up pic to try to transmit to him the atmosphere of the place. There is a small window with no glass, and from there, I took a picture of the inside. Coming home, I noticed painted on the small wooden altar two musical angels, but I couldn’t see them enough, so we made an appointment to visit the inside of the church properly. One of Alessandro’s young judo students comes right from the family who keeps the church's keys, and his grandfather is playing the bells every evening at 6.30 p.m.
I already told several times about that evening when I brought the cello da Spalla at the local chorus rehearsal for the first time. With no surprise at all, the director told me: “oh, you with the Große Geige (literally, big violin), you can help the tenors”. We found that the two musical angels played the lute and a große Geige. Typically when the angels are just two, one is a lute, or harp ororgan, an accompaniment instrument, and the other is a violin or a cornetto or a trumpet, a melodic instrument. Instead, here we have a lute and a grosse geige, an instrument of the size of a tenor. I find this a bit unusual. Usually, a bigger bowed instrument comes only after a smaller one, accompanying the smaller one in a slightly bigger ensemble.
I am not saying that this instrument is a Violoncello da Spalla, it is a too early period, it has C holes, four strings. But it is a tenor sized instrument which has a melodic role, and this in the tiny church of a tiny community, composed now of four houses. The church was consecrated in the mid of XIII century, on the top of a hill which was inhabited and a sacred place since (I discovered from a plate on the entrance of the church) 1000 b. C.
As our friend Eliakim put it commenting on our Instagram post: gold nuggets can be found near us!
Further readings:
If you are interested in strings there is an update in the comments of this article:
If you don't feel like reading more, you may appreciate this short cartoon story:
News from da Spalla world
If you are in New York you may like to get in touch with Andrew Gonzalez, as he is playing two recitals on his spalla in January!
Updates from our workshop
This week we both worked on the top of the two Violoncellos da Spalla we are making. After carving the inside I am now approaching the outside. Alessandro is currently fixing the bass bar.
Featured video of the week
I was a violinist and when I decided to play viola, I expected it to be easier than I actually found it. I made the mistake to rely on a very small viola, so it was not that satisfactory in sound, but also not different enough from the violin to tell my body and muscle memory to shift to a different instrument. My right arm was playing a bigger violin, without really finding a viola voice and my left hand had to continuously adjust on intonation. To me passing to a big viola was a pivotal moment. With a feeling-different position, also the hand and the bow arm adapted more promptly to the requirements of the different instrument. However playing a big viola can be tiring, so how can we manage to play a Violoncello da Spalla which is even bigger than that?
It is clearly explained in this video by one of my teachers, Dmity Badiarov.
To this I would add that you don’t even need the torsion of the left hand that we have on the violin and even more on the viola, this is a fact! A fact that helps a lot when stretching the fingers that bit more to get the right intervals.
Definitely, Violoncello da Spalla is not a big viola! It’s a cello, smaller and more comfortable than the usual big one!