Books › British Violin Makers, 1920 › scan 96
Scan 96
British Violin Makers, 1920
8 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 76. See the scan on archive.org.
1a table which, experience has shown, is delicately sensible to defects. In this table the sound-hole is but a decorative crack, and just as detrimental to the expression of full and perfect tone as any other crack. The old violins with really fine tone (and they are fewer than is generally supposed) possess this tone-quality in spite of their sound-holes—not because of them."
3There are numerous other vagaries of recent introduction, some of them being revivals of forgotten freaks, such as the patent leather fiddle, the one-table fiddle, the reversed head fiddle, etc. There are patent finger-boards, tail pieces, tail-peggs, key pegs, and what not.
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7The factory fiddle claims a paragraph or two. This ubiquitous intruder came among us long ago, and when it did it evidently had made up its mind to come to stay. Decry it as we will, it is determined never to shake off from its varnish the dust of British resin. I am not sure that its advent was altogether such a bad event as we are wont to picture it. We know that it unfortunately helped to kill the home-made and hand-made article, but then we also know that it has helped to popularize the "King of instruments" in a country and among a people which are said to be not over-musical. The high-class, hand-made, artistic violin can never be produced at a price which brings it within the reach of the poorest of the people. Some violin makers claim that they can complete an instrument in the white in one week, but it is not possible that
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