Bow & Bridge Violin and bow makers, as the old books printed them

Books › A descriptive catalogue of the musical instruments recently exhibited at the Royal Military Exhibition, London, 1890 …, 1891 › scan 123

Scan 123

A descriptive catalogue of the musical instruments recently exhibited at the Royal Military Exhibition, London, 1890 …, 1891

8 lines. Read by computer on 1 October 2026. Printed page 103. See the scan on archive.org.

1maker of Brunswick, about the middle of the last century. Some years later a sixth key which produced
3was invented by the clarinet player Lefèvre, who was one of the professors at the Paris Conservatoire about 1790. The clarinet with five keys was, however, in general use at the beginning of the present century.
5About the year 1800 the clarinettist Ivan Muller, who had been long studying the defects of the instrument, and the best methods of remedying them, succeeded after many experiments in producing a clarinet which to a great extent has held its own even to the present day. In this new instrument the number of keys was increased to 13, which gave the following sounds:—
7The intonation of this clarinet was truer than that of the old five or six keyed instruments, and a great number of shakes were made possible. The fingering, however, became changed, and owing to the antagonism of various makers and professors, the new instrument was adopted but slowly. Owing to the imperfection of the old instruments, they had been made in various keys, and the employment of alternative joints of different pitch (corps de rechange) was general. The use, therefore, of so many different instruments was, by the adoption of Muller's clarinet, rendered unnecessary. This possibly influenced players in rejecting the new invention, for they feared that they would lose in quality of tone what they gained by purity of intonation. To render the fingering more easy, rollers were invented in 1804 by Jansen, a clarinet player at the Opera in Paris, and were applied to the keys worked by the little finger of the left hand. The use of rollers was afterwards applied to both the flute and the bassoon.

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