Books › Old violins, 1905 › scan 180
Scan 180
Old violins, 1905
10 lines. Read by computer on 27 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1with his audience, lifts his tapering wand and rules therewith the
3 "Tides of music's golden sea setting towards eternity."
5By those who indite exhaustive historical or constructive treatises on the violin—the bow, like the violin, has been treated archaeologically—we have been led up to ancient monuments and shown bows (or things supposed to be bows) on vases, sculptured frescoes, missals, and other monkish manuscripts. We have been sent out to wild islands and continents, and introduced to the Ravanastron bow of ancient Ceylon; the bow of the Moorish rebab; the ninth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth century viol bows of Europe—all more or less primitive, with sometimes gut for hair, or hair loose, hair limp, and with no means of regulating its tension except by the introduction of the fingers to press the hair or tighten it for a moment.
7In Paul Veronese's Marriage at Cana (Versailles) this is well shown. Paul himself was a viol player, and apparently held his bow chiefly by the hair for this same regulative purpose.
9C. Simpson (the division "viol"), 1667, gives a somewhat more advanced viol bow, in which the hand splits the difference between wood and hair and rests on both (Fig. iii.). Of course, when held to the chin, this clumsy finger regulation of the hair tension would be less convenient to manage, and hence we come upon the eighteenth century with a strip of notched metal (Fig. iv.) and a movable sliding nut.
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