Books › Old violins and violin lore. Famous makers of Cremona and Brescia, and of England, France, and Germany (with biographical dictionary); famous players; and chapters on varnish, strings and bows, 1893 › scan 14
Scan 14
Old violins and violin lore. Famous makers of Cremona and Brescia, and of England, France, and Germany (with biographical dictionary); famous players; and chapters on varnish, strings and bows, 1893
16 lines. Read by computer on 14 September 2026. Printed page 8. See the scan on archive.org.
1Next I observe that the violin possesses a trinity in unity of power which invests it with a quite singular and felicitous completeness of its own:—
3(1) Accent—and in staccato passages almost the accent of percussion.
5(2) Sustained sound—to a degree far beyond the capabilities of the human voice.
7(3) Modified tone—and in such refinement of gradation, that the melting lines of the spectrum can alone supply us with a parallel or analogy.
9Your piano possesses accent, but once strike a note, soft or loud, and it passes beyond your control.
11The piano has little sustained and no modified tone.
13Your organ has accent and sustained tone, but in a very imperfect sense modified tone; and a brief survey of all musical instruments now in use will convince the student of acoustics that nowhere but in the violin do we find to anything like the same degree, that trinity in unity of power summed up in accent, sustained sound, modified tone.
15But the half has not yet been revealed. The trinity of power in the violin is placed under the immediate control of two hands—of ten fingers, each hand functioning differently. The hand on the finger-board is engaged in pressing the strings; the other hand wields the bow, and not only sets the strings in vibration, but drives, tears, plunges, caresses, checks, prolongs, magnetises and regulates, in an altogether marvellous fashion, the outpourings of sound, which are in reality the outpourings of the musician's soul,—and further:
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