Scan 29
Musical instruments, historic, rare and unique;, 1921
6 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1strings, in vogue in Europe only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, may be added as also of remote origin in India. The Hindus and Persians have both used gourds attached to the Vinas and Sitárs (Plate XL.) for resonance. In Southern India, where the use of the original Hindu Vína prevails, although the scale now used is at least heptatonic, there is still a leaning towards pentatonic forms of melody. The accordances are in fourths or fifths and octaves. The Sitár of Northern India and greater use of the interval of the third may be attributed to Persian introduction; but throughout India, and more intensely in the south, music is felt as a poetic art, and has a development in its own way, that still remains unrecognised in Europe, although we now have scholars from whose researches and zeal this ignorance may be in time, at least partially, dispelled. Music is acutely felt as a means of expression in India unknown in China or among the Indo-Chinese races.
3The vexed question of the introduction of the bow to stringed instruments, upon which the most eminent authorities are not yet disposed to agree, is one that needs only to be mentioned here. Whether of Asiatic or European introduction, it would appear at first to have been only one of the ways by which sounds could be drawn from strings, and that it gradually became victorious over the plectrum, with instruments of the viol kind, which thereby gained a great development. It is even now permitted to use the fingers to a bowed instrument in the pizzicato of the violin and violoncello.
5The Psaltery was a plectrum instrument derived from the Arab Qanūn; it is rarely absent in paintings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries where musical instruments are represented. The same instrument, increased in the weight of stringing to resist the impact of hammers, is the familiar dulcimer, which, like the hurdy-gurdy and the bagpipe, has seen better days. What was once thought of the dulcimer is shown by the painting that adorns the one drawn in Plate XVII. It seems almost vexatious that we do not know who first adjusted a key-board to a psaltery, and thus constructed a spinet. It was not earlier than the fifteenth century, but the name of the meritorious inventor has not come down to us, or where he lived. It seems most likely from the earliest name, clavicymbalum, being Latin,
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