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Scan 11
A comparitive study of the development of the left hand technic of the violin, 1913
10 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1ing gives the following definition of the technique of the left hand:-
31. The utmost precision in raising and lowering the fingers.
52. The muscular strength necessary to carry the player unwearied through ordinary or uncommon difficulties.
73. The skill required in velocity, peculiar note succession, and awkward note combinations.
9Of those three underlying principles of technique, it is possible that the second is the most important. Whether or not the violin players of the earlier centuries used great finger pressure, realized the necessity of it, or whether they had the muscular strength to exert, we have no way of determining, but by referring to the opinions advanced by musical authorities that up to and including the sixteenth century all violin music was purely vocal in character and never exceeded one lined A, and by investigating the scores of the Corelli Sonates (1653-1713), where we find that not once does the rhythm exceed eighth notes, and not one scale or arpeggio passage exceeding or even approaching an octave occurs — we may say that the strength demands were not what they are today where we in Spohr, for example, in five hundred measures chosen at random, find twenty-nine hundred and fifty seven notes, thirteen scale and eighteen arpeggio passages of more than two octaves. In the comparison of the rhythmic differentiation of the several great violin composers, although Mozart has used, in the five hundred chosen measures, more notes than any of the others, we may account for that by the fact that his works have less peculiar note succession and awkward note combinations than those of our more recent composers. He, too, uses less frequently extended scale and arpeggio passages than our more modern composers. He uses in the five hundred chosen measures
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