Books › Old violins, 1910 › scan 21
Scan 21
Old violins, 1910
10 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 17. See the scan on archive.org.
1rough image on the vase, but the fact that a musician, astronomer, and doctor, by name Chiron, is seated beside it.
3We probably see the descendants of any such instruments as may have existed in those times in the Ravanastron, which has been recognised by some as the oriental precursor of the occidental fiddle.
5Altogether, I think that, from the musical point of view, too much time, and a surplus of barren antiquarian lore, have been bestowed on the origin of the viol tribe.
7Our business begins not even with the building up of the viol out of the Rebek, Crouth, and Rotta (see "Music and Morals," p. 382), but with the emergence of the violin tenor, violoncello, and double-bass out of that confused, tentative, and often grotesque crowd of viols and viol da Gambas, specimens of which are still exhibited behind glass in our Art Museums and Loan Collections. We have little to do with them. They are of no more living account than the Egyptian mummies in the British Museum. A few retain a gleam of practical importance for the violin collector, because they have been cut down for tenors or otherwise used up during the last three hundred years by violin makers: the others remain of interest to musicians only; like the bones of fossil crocodiles, they are curious studies in the comparative anatomy, not of reptiles, but of musical instruments, that is all.
9No, it is with the distinct evolution of the violin, by
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