Books › The heart of music; the story of the violin, 1906 › scan 177
Scan 177
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.
1The Lute Maker of Tyrol
3path. He had yearnings toward the perfect violin, — the thing that only one master was to achieve, a master not yet born. To this end he took up the study of bow instruments. Rank heresy it was, for his father scorned the clumsy viols of the day, and had spent his long life in the making of lutes as fine as shells in form and as sweet in tone as the voices of streams. But Kaspar worked still at his viols, — worked from red sunrise to red sunset, and far into the night, when the stars rained white fire upon the hills and the wind made violin music around the little workshop.
5Now, as we have already seen, the bow instruments of that day were cumbersome, crude, unwieldy things; they were hard to handle, hard to balance, hard to play, and many of them even harder to listen to.
7An instrument which we call the tenor viol was then played in all the private orchestras, although its inconvenient form — between a violin and a violoncello — made it very awkward and difficult to play. Its tone was much softer than the rebeck and German "geige" (fiddle), which were still in vogue, but it lacked not only suitability of size but carrying power of tone. The violin, when it came into use, was not
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