Most of this album was sourced from the top drawer of a filing cabinet I’ve not laid eyes on in decades. Located in a room on the third floor of Peabody Conservatory’s Leakin Building, the filing cabinet sat just to the right of the giant instrument lockers that dominated the space. Its worn gunmetal gray finish practically begged you to look right past it to the shelves full of colorful books, but I knew its top drawer was set aside for the viol. Inside there were spare strings, rosin, and, at least from my then-youthful perspective, so many odd books. These books were small and oddly shaped, they were full of music I couldn’t read, and even the ones with English text were hard for me to make much sense of. What I didn’t know then, but have come to appreciate now thirty years on, was that among those books was a fine selection of what I call the “mother texts” of the viola da gamba. Primarily written and published in the 16th and 17th centuries, these books and the music within came from a time when the viol was new, and music’s very nature was being redefined again and again across Europe. Each of these books contain music and perspectives I turn to continually in my practice as a performer and a teacher, so I thought it would be fun to get them out of my own filing cabinet and document a few decades of thought, practice, and appreciation in a project that eventually became Unaccompanied Vol. 3: Didaktika.