Musicianship Professor Set to Release Album

The album, titled The Undiscovered Viola d'Amore, will be released on the Centaur label later this year and includes many newly discovered pieces from the 17th and 19th centuries. The recording begins with seven Galanteries by the Bohemian and Moravian composers Franz Götz (1755–1815) and Joseph Fuchs (dates unknown). Both composers were associated with the Archbishop's court in Olomouc, a city in the eastern part of the modern-day Czech Republic and a center of viola d'amore music for several hundred years. The Galanteries were recently discovered in the Czech National Library by an undergraduate researcher and feature some of the most virtuosic writing for the viola d'amore before the 20th century.

The rest of the album is in collaboration with Chatham Baroque, Pittsburgh's world-class professional baroque trio, as well as local harpsichord virtuoso Justin Wallace. A familiar trio sonata by Johann David Heinichen (1683–1729) follows the Galanteries, along with two newly-discovered partitas from the Göttweig Manuscript. These partitas were found a few years ago in a Benedictine monastery near Vienna and could have been composed by the famous 17th-century violinist Heinrich Biber (1644–1704), who was known to have performed frequently on the viola d'amore.

Dr. Miller has spent years researching this music. "I studied manuscripts in Prague with my colleague Thomas Georgi, a viola d'amore expert who performed for over 20 years in Toronto's famous Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra," he said. "We transcribed this music from its arcane tablature notation into something more legible for today's players." Miller also published an article on the Galanteries in the top-tier journal Early Music in 2017.

The Undiscovered Viola d'Amore will be available as a physical CD and on all streaming platforms on September 1, 2023. Excerpts from the album are in the gallery below.