Books › A special loan exhibition of musical instruments, manuscripts, books, portraits, and other mementoes of music and musicians, formed to commemorate the tercentenary of the granting by King James I of a charter of incorporation to the Worshipful company of musicians in 1604 .., 1904 › scan 138
Scan 138
A special loan exhibition of musical instruments, manuscripts, books, portraits, and other mementoes of music and musicians, formed to commemorate the tercentenary of the granting by King James I of a charter of incorporation to the Worshipful company of musicians in 1604 .., 1904
6 lines. Read by computer on 1 October 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1Harps, Lutes, Guitars, Zithers, Dulcimers, &c.
3PREFACE.
5THE older members of the class of instrument included in this section have an origin that is lost in antiquity: from the days when the hunter, drawing across his bow a tightly-stretched string, produced (undoubtedly at first by accident) a musical sound, there has existed the embryo harp; before the era of any historical details that have been handed down to us, these first rough instruments were in use. To one stretched string it was an easy task to add others, and in pictures of early harps we find the form of the hunter's bow retained, the strings attached thereto increasing in number as time went on. So long as it remained without a front pillar, little tension could be borne by the feeble frame, and consequently little sound obtained; but the addition of this bar, and of the resonating chamber (or sound board) on the other side of the strings was a great step in the development of the instrument. A complete diatonic scale was an early possession, but the formation of chromatic notes by any other means than the rough-and-ready one of shortening the strings by the placing of the fingers on them was not put into practice until 1811, when the inventive genius of Erard gave first a single-action, and afterwards a double-action pedal, which affected the notes by a semitone and a tone respectively, this being the carrying out of an idea which had been conceived but never practically realised by a French maker named Cosineau. This harp, with sound board, pillar, and double-action pedal, fitted for the performance of all modern music with its chromatic effects, is the harp of to-day; an interesting variant is the "Welsh Triple Harp," elaborate and complete in its mechanism,
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