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 139
Scan 139
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.
1which substitutes an additional row of strings instead of using the pedals for the chromatic notes, adding greatly to the difficulty of performance. In appearance the harp must be esteemed as the most graceful and beautiful of all musical instruments.
3Beautiful, too, as works of art, with their inlaid ivory, are the lutes of our forefathers: like their modern descendant, the guitar and the bowed viols, and unlike the harp, many notes could be played on one string, although plucking rather than bowing was the method of production of the sound; but in this instrument the resonating body was from the first present. From the tombstones of Egyptian monuments we may form ideas as to the shape of the earliest lutes, the frets (marking the position on the finger board to be taken to produce other notes than the open string) being even then in evidence; the Greeks possessed it in the modified form of the cithara (allied to the lyre), but the lute proper, and the guitar, may be traced to Spain, and thence back to the Moors, and so to the times of the Egyptian dynasties. Elaborately strung and difficult to play, it yet became an instrument of universal popularity in Europe, and it was made in infinite variety, with many sizes, and varying numbers of strings, from the small cithern to the great arch-lute. Thus music in parts was possible, and in Elizabethan times there were consorts of lutes, the ingenuity of the minstrels of the day having much influence in the development of music; played both as solo and as accompanying instruments, the lute had a répertoire of its own written in tablature (not the ordinary musical notation, but a staff with indications for the position of the fingers in the frets required to produce the notes); its modern descendant, the mandoline, is greatly inferior to it in beauty of tone, and is moreover played by a plectrum.
5The guitar, allied to the lute, but with the difference of having a flat, and not a curved back, has six strings, and is a more modern instrument; it has two forms, the Spanish and the English, the latter having a different shaped body, and having gradually given way to the older model. Both had frets, and have a twentieth century descendant in the
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