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Peter Holman, Life after Death: The Viola da Gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolmetsch; and Peter Holman, editor, Purcell

For some decades now Peter Holman has been a major contributor to scholarship on music in seventeenth-century England; he has also taken several forays into music and performance in later periods. His prolific output includes award-winning books, editions, and articles, and his recordings further testify to his acquaintance with and knowledge of seventeenth-century repertory. In 1993 Holman published Four and Twenty Fiddlers: The Violin at the English Court, 1540–1690 (Oxford, reissued in paperback, 1996), a groundbreaking study of the violin’s early history in England. The reviews of Four and Twenty Fiddlers lauded Holman’s exhaustive research and his ability to bring together disparate data from a variety of sources into a cohesive, compelling history. Now, almost twenty years later, Holman has written another such book: Life after Death: The Viola da Gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolmetsch. This book, as well as Holman’s edited volume, Purcell, continues his tradition of multifaceted contributions to the study and performance of early music. Most general music histories cease discussing the gamba after the Baroque period, yet Holman traces its history from that time to the famous early music performances of Arnold Dolmetsch in the late nineteenth century. “Ancient” music in nineteenth-century Britain has been the subject of several books in recent years, including such contributions as Suzanne Cole’s Thomas Tallis and His Music in Victorian England (2008), which is also part of Boydell & Brewer’s series, Music in Britain, 1600–1900. The topic is a fruitful one that has yielded much insight into how Victorians read and valued the music of earlier times. What distinguishes Holman’s book is that he stresses continuity at least as much, if not more than, revival. He effectively demonstrates that there was not so much a revival of the viola da gamba