Books › The heart of music; the story of the violin, 1906 › scan 117
Scan 117
The heart of music; the story of the violin, 1906
6 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1plaintive, monotonous, and distinctly Oriental in character. The bow was triangular, and the bridge so low that it was very difficult to play without striking all the strings at once.
3There are those, and no few persons either, who declare that neither the crwth nor yet its developed phœnix, which rose from its own ashes and was played with a bow throughout England, was the true ancestor of the violin. These authorities insist that the evolution of the fiddle took place in the South, not the North. But there will always be numberless sides, distinct as the facets of a diamond, to every such question.
5We have now seen the evolution of the crwth from a harp to a fiddle — a rather remarkable example of development, by the by. As a rule, when an instrument changes its character it changes its name. Thus the monochord became a lyre, the pipe a trumpet, the harpsichord a piano. But the crwth remained a crwth through all its phases and manifestations, as though its individuality was too strong and insistent to be lost merely through a few changes in form and treatment. The variations from crwth to crowd and cruit and so on were purely a matter of language and inevitable dialectic changes.
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