Books › The heart of music; the story of the violin, 1906 › scan 132
Scan 132
The heart of music; the story of the violin, 1906
8 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1With Rebeck and Viol
3Remove the bow and your rebeck was not a rebeck. This simplified the problem of the populace that happened to be bent on gay stringed music. The bow was abandoned, and the rebeck, shorn of its distinguishing factor, became a rebeck no longer. Its shape became slightly, very slightly altered, and in its new form it was known as a mandolin, mandolina, or mandola,—a sort of modified lute dearly beloved by the Spanish people. In its larger form it was the 'guitar which has endured to this day.
5It was in this form that it travelled back to Italy,—once passed in its hasty journey,—and before its wonderful upward flight to perfection.
7When the rebeck became a mandolin and guitar, and journeyed into Provence to be given a bow again, and was rechristened the guitar fiddle, just such another contradictory evolution took place as we have seen in the fortunes of the crwth. That instrument, we may remember, evolved backward and became a lyre after it had been a "bulging box," and then turned all the way around and became a bulging box again, after all. This eccentric way of doing things, however, seems to have been confined to the instruments of Spain. For the French bow instruments never went into disuse, and they went on no pilgrim-
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