Scan 13
The heart of music; the story of the violin, 1906
12 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1PRELUDE
3"Into the town will I, my frendes to vysit there,
4And hither straight again to see th' end of this yere;
5In the meantime, fellowes, pype up your fiddles, I say, take them,
6And let your frendes here have such mirth as ye can make them."
7T. Colwell, 1575.
9Of necessity a history of the violin must be a history, first and foremost, of everything except the violin. The violin has no history. When Stradivari made the Perfect Fiddle its history was begun and ended in one breath. One could write elaborate stories of Paganini's "Cannon" and Sarasati's "Boissier," but this would be a history of violins and violinists, not of the violin.
11The writer, in deep love of the greatest of all instruments and a desire to trace its origin to its most remote sources, has found herself traversing very circuitous paths, and consorting with a mixed company of instruments,—all ancestors of the fiddle, undoubtedly, but bearing little more than a family resemblance to the beautiful thing the evolution of which she had begun to investigate. She can only express the hope that her readers will find some small tenth of the delight which came to her, in her voyages in search of the
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