Books › Biographical notice of Nicolo Paganini, with an analysis of his compositions, and a sketch of the history of the violin, 1876 › scan 11
Scan 11
Biographical notice of Nicolo Paganini, with an analysis of his compositions, and a sketch of the history of the violin, 1876
9 lines. Read by computer on 29 August 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1SKETCH OF THE
2HISTORY OF THE VIOLIN.
4The Instrument.
6DESPITE all contrary assertions, based upon pretended monuments, Oriental, Greek, and Roman antiquity was unacquainted with instruments played with a bow. Neither India nor Egypt furnish the least traces of them; nor do Greece and Italy; nor, in fact, does the whole of the old civilized world. As I stated in the "Résumé Philosophique de l’Histoire de la Musique," the bow comes from the West; it was introduced into the whole of Europe by the western nations. Though Viols are found among the modern Arabs in Persia and Turkey, they were taken there by Europeans in the time of the Crusades. The Goudock of the Russian peasant, and the Crwth of the ancient Irish, appear to proceed from the highest antiquity, and to have been the type of instruments of this nature. The Irish chroniclers speak of musicians who, in the sixth century, were celebrated for their talent on the Crwth, a species of Viol with six strings; and Venance Fortunat, a Latin poet who wrote in 609, states distinctly that this instrument belonged to Great Britain.
8It is not my intention to follow up here the various transformations of bow instruments in the middle ages; it will suffice to observe that there were frequent changes in them from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century; as much in the common kinds, vulgarly called in French Rebec, and in German Geige
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