Scan 36
A dictionary of old English music & musical instruments 1923, 1923
23 lines. Read by computer on 19 September 2026. Printed page 18. See the scan on archive.org.
1BASE VIOLIN: A term often applied in the Seventeenth Century to the violoncello, and not to be confounded with Bass-Viol.
3BASS STRING: The lowest string on the viols and the unfingered strings of the lutes. From the circumstance that the bass string produced the lowest note that was obtainable on a viol, Shakespeare took the metaphor: "I have sounded the very base-string of humility" (I Henry IV, II, 4).
5BASSUS: The bass-part in old polyphonic music was often given the Latin form of the name, bassus.
7BASS VIOL. v. VIOLS.
9BEAR A PART: A common expression in Elizabethan and Stuart England meaning "to play an instrument in a consort," or "take part in a polyphonic vocal-composition." It was a figure of speech in everyday use in an age when playing and singing correctly at sight were two of the indispensable virtues of the cultured members of society. That celebrated pamphlet of Roger L'Estrange (enthusiastic amateur gambist and Licenser of the Press), Truth and Loyalty Vindicated, 1662, contains a typical example of the use to which the phrase was put: "I . . . found a Private company of some five or six Persons. They desired me to take up a Viole, and bear a Part."
11BEAT: An ornament like a reversed Backfall. John Playford (Introduction to the Skill of Musick) explains it thus:
13Written: Performed:
15Christopher Simpson (Division-Violist, 1659) gives "Plain-Beat" and "Rise" as synonymous terms.
16A more elaborate variety of the Beat was the Shaked Beat, given by the same two authorities as follows:
18Written: Performed:
20BEGGAR'S OPERA. v. BALLAD OPERA.
22BERGOMASK: Why Shakespeare should make Bottom offer
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