Tobias Hume

Hume was a profesional officer in both the Swedish and Russian armies. As a viol player he published two volumes of Lyra Viol music. Most of the music he wrote was composed in the tablature style making it inaccessible to most modern musicians. Upon self-reflection Hume considered himself a soldier and not a musician, the ability of which he considered the effeminate part of his character. The two volumes he composed were respectively entitled "The First Part of Ayres," and "Captaine Humes Poeticall Musicke." The first volume contained solo lyra viol music, the largest repertory by any single composer from the early seventeenth century. Genres of compositional forms varied from dances to descriptive musical epithets. ~ Keith Johnson