The Viola da Gamba Society's Thematic Index of Music for Viols has now been added in its entirety to the Society's website at <www.vdgs.org.uk> and comprises all additions and corrections to November 2008. In future it is intended to update the work annually. Some of the files are large and will be split into smaller units at the next update. Copies on CD-ROM can still be made for those who would prefer this format.

Volume 2 of The Viola da Gamba Society Journal, online at the same site, is devoted to topics from after the ‘golden age’ of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Bettina Hoffmann conducts a semantic investigation into the words used for the viol in Italy from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries. She concludes that the news is mostly bad for those who want to play Italian music on the viol, but she succeeds in throwing much-needed light on a murky area. Her paper needs to be read by all those who label instruments in museums, edit Italian music of the period, write about it and, above all, perform and record it. John Robinson provides us with the first detailed study of the Leyden lyra viol manuscript, now in Newcastle University Library, and a nineteenth-century partial copy of it, now in the National Library of Scotland. It is an important source of Scots tunes arranged for the viol, although it also contains English music, by Henry Purcell and his contemporaries. Peter Holman surveys what is known of the musical activities of the novelist Laurence Sterne, routinely said in the Sterne literature to have been a bass viol player. This serves as an introduction to Claire Berget's study of the links and parallels between Sterne and Charles Frederick Abel. She argues that both were leading exponents of the period's cult of sensibility, and that Abel's playing had its counterpart in ‘musical’ features of Sterne's novels.

So far, the Thematic Index has neglected eighteenth-century composers, but it is hoped to expand coverage of them from 2009, including more on Abel, C. P. E. Bach, Franz Benda, Carl Heinrich and Johann Gottlieb Graun, Franz Xavier Hammer, Johann Gottlieb Janitsch, Christoph Schaffrath and Joseph Benedikt Zyka.