Scan 74
The American history and encyclopedia of music, 1910
8 lines. Read by computer on 8 September 2026. Printed page 52. See the scan on archive.org.
1are passed several rods of metal, and little bells are suspended from the rods. Just before the Christian era the worship of Isis, which had grown into a barbaric revel, was carried to Rome, where its impure practices commended it.
3The marimba of Africa, with its bars of wood laid across other pieces of wood, or suspended over gourd resonators, is primitive man's idea of the modern xylophone. The xylophone figures in the writings of Virdung (1511), and attains an unmerited prominence in an illustrated Anglo-Saxon psalter of the Eleventh Century, where it appears hanging with the harps upon the Babylonian willows. This tuning of bars of wood appears in many countries, one instance being the Japanese mokkine. The tekkin, also of Japan, bears a great similarity to the glockenspiel, in which bars of metal are substituted for those of wood.
5Bars of metal are struck, and metallic strips are plucked or bowed, to create musical vibrations. The nanze of the African is a representative of the plucked type. The instinct for the crude constructing of this instrument appears to be inherent in the African; wherever he may be, if by any possibility he can secure the necessary materials, he will combine them. Very similar, but of wholly individual origin, is the European nail violin, an invention of the Eighteenth Century. It belongs to the bowed category, and is the development of an idea suggested by the passing of the violin bow against a nail. The jew's-harp, with its metal reed, also belongs to this division.
7Glass has been employed as a music-producing substance. That the glass harmonica originated at the dinner table in wine glasses varyingly filled, which were found to produce the tones of the scale, is an explanation that is generally accepted. The instrument has been developed by Pockrich, Franklin and others, until the keyed harmonica is the result. This unusual agent in the production of music has a primitive relative. The natives of New Ireland in the Bismarck Archipelago have an instrument called kulepa-ganez, in which highly polished wood is employed
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