Books › Old violins and violin lore, 1900 › scan 19
Scan 19
Old violins and violin lore, 1900
8 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1OLD VIOLINS
3without ever elaborating the idea in an instrument for musical purposes.
5Both Fêtis and Vidal deny that any instrument of the viol tribe existed in antiquity, apparently on the slender grounds that the few fragments of pottery, papyrus, or mural decoration known to us have not yet revealed the fact. I think it probable that these savants are wrong. Like the use of the wheel, bow and arrows, bow and string for drilling holes, the bow or something like it employed for musical purposes is likely, on a priori grounds alone, to be of immense antiquity, and at least as old as the knowledge of percussion instruments such as the drum, or of wind instruments such as the pan-pipes.
7I don't lay any great stress upon pictures of stringed instruments with something like a bridge taken to prove the existence of a bow, especially if the bow happens to be absent—a guitar has a bridge but no bow, so has the zither and the bandoline, which are plucked with the fingers or a plectrum. The much-talked-of Canino Vase (fig. 103, vol. iii. of Micali's Storia Degli Antichi Popoli Italiani), showing apparently a sort of instrument with apparently a sort of bow, has been held by some to be conclusive that something like the violin tribe was known to the Etruscans. Possibly! Personally I am not satisfied that it is a musical instrument at all which is figured on that same vase—it might be anything, from a rattle or a torch to a broom or a dust-pan. The strongest point in its favour as a musical instrument is not the
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.