JAVS Spring 2026

The opening chapters on Marin Marais and Franz Joseph Haydn are particularly effective in grounding historical context in lived musical experience. Wells’s discussion of Marais’s meticulous notation and pedagogical intent highlights a theme that resonates strongly with violists: composers writing with intimate knowledge of their instrument’s physical and expressive realities. The attention given to fingering systems, bowing practices, and idiomatic notation feels immediately relevant, especially for a community accustomed to translating repertoire across instrumental boundaries. The chapter on Haydn’s baryton trios offers a persuasive and engaging account of why the baryton survives at all in modern performance culture. Wells convincingly argues that its revival is not accidental, but the direct result of Haydn’s sustained, idiomatic, and imaginative writing. For violists, the recurring presence of the viola— often likely played by Haydn himself—adds a sense of historical kinship that feels both grounding and affirming. Wells shows that instruments endure not because they are novel, but because composers loved them enough to write well for them. Schubert’s Arpeggione Sonata is handled with particular sensitivity. Rather than treating the work simply as a familiar staple of the modern viola repertoire by transcription, Wells re-centers the arpeggione itself. By addressing tuning, range, balance, and texture, he encourages violists to reconsider long-held interpretive habits—not to abandon modern practice, but to enrich it. By restoring the arpeggione to the conversation, Wells invites violists to hear a familiar masterpiece with newly attentive ears. The chapter devoted to the viola d’amore stands out as one of the book’s most valuable contributions. Wells’s synthesis of repertoire by Ariosti, Vivaldi, Graupner, and J. S. Bach is both historically rigorous and practically illuminating. His discussion of tuning systems and technical demands avoids romanticizing the instrument’s sympathetic strings, instead showing how composers used them deliberately and expressively. For violists curious about expanding their instrumental vocabulary, this chapter functions as both historical guide and quiet encouragement.

At first glance, the final chapter on the Hardanger fiddle in America may seem peripheral, yet it ultimately reinforces the book’s central argument: instruments survive through communities, curiosity, and adaptation. By tracing how a regional folk instrument finds new life in unfamiliar cultural contexts, Wells reminds us that musical relevance is never fixed. All Strings Attached ultimately argues that history is not something we inherit—it is something we continue to play. While some chapters retain the imprint of their academic origins, this transparency reads as a strength rather than a limitation. The book wears its pedagogical lineage openly, aligning naturally with the lived experience of many violists who move fluidly between scholarship, teaching, and performance. In the end, All Strings Attached is less about cataloging forgotten instruments than about expanding musical perspective. It invites violists to listen more broadly, think more historically, and approach familiar repertoire with renewed curiosity. This book is an invitation—to curiosity, to context, and to a deeper sense of belonging within the viola’s long and interconnected history.

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Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 42, No. 1, Spring 2026