Sonnerie de Ste-Geneviève du Mont-de-Paris, "The Bells of St. Genevieve" in English, is a work by Marin Marais

Marin Marais

Marin Marais was a French composer and viol player. He studied composition with Jean-Baptiste Lully, often conducting his operas, and with master of the bass viol Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe for 6 months. He was hired as a musician in 1676 to the royal court of Versailles...

 written in 1723 for viol

Viol

The viol is any one of a family of bowed, fretted and stringed musical instruments developed in the mid-late 15th century and used primarily in the Renaissance and Baroque periods. The family is related to and descends primarily from the Renaissance vihuela, a plucked instrument that preceded the...

, violin

Violin

The violin is a string instrument, usually with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest, highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which includes the viola and cello....

 and harpsichord

Harpsichord

A harpsichord is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It produces sound by plucking a string when a key is pressed.In the narrow sense, "harpsichord" designates only the large wing-shaped instruments in which the strings are perpendicular to the keyboard...

 with basso continuo

Figured bass

Figured bass, or thoroughbass, is a kind of integer musical notation used to indicate intervals, chords, and non-chord tones, in relation to a bass note...

. It can be considered a passacaglia

Passacaglia

The passacaglia is a musical form that originated in early seventeenth-century Spain and is still used by contemporary composers. It is usually of a serious character and is often, but not always, based on a bass-ostinato and written in triple metre....

 or a chaconne

Chaconne

A chaconne ; is a type of musical composition popular in the baroque era when it was much used as a vehicle for variation on a repeated short harmonic progression, often involving a fairly short repetitive bass-line which offered a compositional outline for variation, decoration, figuration and...

, with a repeating D, F, E bass line. Being a student of Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe

Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe

Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe was a French composer and violist.It is speculated by various scholars that Monsieur de Sainte-Colombe was of Lyonnais or Burgundian petty nobility; and also the selfsame 'Jean de Sainte-Colombe' noted as the father of 'Monsieur de Saint Colombe le fils.This assumption...

, it is perhaps Marais' most famous composition that explores the various techniques of the viol.

The work begins with 4 measures of the bass line played by the continuo and viol, then, on the 5th measure the violin takes over the melody. Throughout the piece, the violin and viol take turns with the melody.

The viol part is of great difficulty because of Marais's mastery of that instrument. The centerpiece is not the melody, the violin, but the viol. His work can be thought of as something to showcase the violist's skill, despite that it does not always have the melody.

The piece also exists in a version for solo double bass, having been arranged by Norman Ludwin for Ludwin Music.