Donald Rickert is In the March/April 2023 Issue of Strings Magazine

I (Don Rickert) am in the March/April issue of Strings Magazine!

I am honored to have been one of several experts interviewed for the article, A Pocket Full of Sound, by Karen Peterson in the March/April 2023 issue of Strings Magazine (No. 311, March/April 2023). I wish I could share the entire article here, but I am pretty sure that that would be a copyright violation. That being said, I feel pretty good about how my comments about the 18^th Century pochette were incorporated into the article. Hats off to the author Karen Peterson for an excellent piece.

Unless you are a Strings Magazine subscriber, or chose to spend $10 to download the March/April 2023 issue, you won’t be able to see it, at least now here. I can, however, summarize the key points:

• The pochette was a tiny violin-like bowed instrument that was usually tuned to a higher pitch than a regular violin.
  • Note: Many pochettes, especially later ones, while still having a very small body, had disproportionately long necks, which made possible the same vibrating string length of a full-size violin, and thus, enabling them to be tuned to regular violin pitch. The tuning pitch of the Baroque period was a bit lower than modern pitch.
• The pochette dates back to the 1500s, when, in its primitive form, was often played by street musicians.
• During the reign of Louis XIV (the Sun King) beginning in the late 17^th Century, the pochette came into its own among the aristocratic elite, or at least their support staff who taught them how to dance.
• Dancing was an important skill for European aristocrats who wanted to fit in.
• Baroque period pochettes incorporated all sorts of precious materials, such as ivory, tortoise shell, ebony and inlaid with precious stones, silver and/or gold.
• While pochettes looked fancy, they mostly sounded awful. This was due in part to their diminutive size, but more owing to the fact that they did not have two essential elements for achieving decent sound from a bowed instrument, a soundpost and bass bar.

See the video for an example of how typical early pochettes sound.

Great musicians - ludicrously small instruments!

A later model - marginally acceptable sound (the instrument, that is - playing is great!)

• • Note 1: I have never been able to find a satisfactory answer to why most pochettes were made without bass bars or soundposts. Their key function to sound production was widely known since at least the 16^th Century.
  • Note 2: Some later pochettes did, in fact, have something like a soundpost and/or a bass bar. Replicas of some of these late 18th Century pochettes actually sounded pretty good. At one time, I built quite a few replicas of a model made in Glasgow and, indeed, they sound amazing for such small instruments.

If you are interested in knowing just how good a Baroque pochette replica can sound, see the following video.

Darci Jones playing a late 18th Century pochette replica by Donald Rickert

• Despite their generally horrible sound, pochettes were deemed “good enough” for sawing out a melody suitable for dance instruction.
• As the 18th Century progressed, knowing how to dance became very important to the emerging Scottish upper middle class hoping to enter high society, or at least to impress one’s peers.
• Due to their portability, the pochette became a key tool for one of the hottest gigs of early and mid-18th Century France and England, teaching dance steps to aristocrats in their homes.
• Dance teachers, or as they came to be known, “Dance Masters,” were the era’s equivalent of a personal trainer. As many, probably most, dance masters were French, the elaborately styled French overcoat was commonly worn, any many had a special pocket for carrying a small fiddle. Such a pocket, in French, was called a “pochette”, or “little pocket”. The instrument, at some point, acquired the same name.
  • Note: The above begs the question, what were pochettes called prior to the era of the dancing master in the 18^th Century?
• The article goes on to discuss the problem of lugging around a full-size violin from home to home as a dance master made his rounds to his clients. Even if a dance master could afford one, a violin case of the Baroque period was not intended for mobility. Period cases were heavy and often did not have handles. The cases of the period were designed for displaying instruments in a fancy music parlor.
• The article finishes with a fairly lengthy exposition of 18^th Century Scottish musicians (not dance masters, but, rather, professional musicians) who were known to have played pochettes.
• The most famous of these professional players was also the most famous violinist in Scotland, Niel Gow, who was instrumental in creating what we now call Scottish Traditional country dance music.
• Gow was among a group of fiddlers associated with a bowing technique known as the “Scotch Snap”, which is either a long note followed by a short note, or a short note followed by a long one. The Scotch Snap led to the creation of the distinctly Scottish tune type known as the Strathspey. The article recounts a popular story that I recalled about how the short pochette bow that Gow would have used while walking to gigs with his pochette contributed to invention of the Scotch snap, as the bow often proved too short, thus requiring a sudden change in bow direction.
  • Note: While the above story is fun, it is just that, a story. The story I recounted was lore rather than established fact. Further, while Gow was indeed among the earliest composers of strathspeys, whether or not he actually invented the musical form or the Scotch snap bowing technique has never been proven. Other contemporaries of Gow, notably William Marshal, also composed many strathspeys, many of them regarded as the greatest strathspeys ever composed.
• The article finishes with an interesting, albeit tenuous, link between the “Scotch snap” and contemporary hip-hop.