Books › The History of the Violin and Other Instruments Played on with the Bow from the Remotest Times to the Present by William Sandys and Andrew Forster, 1864 › scan 29
Scan 29
The History of the Violin and Other Instruments Played on with the Bow from the Remotest Times to the Present by William Sandys and Andrew Forster, 1864
8 lines. Read by computer on 29 August 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1instrument; as, cythara Barbara, cythara Teutonica, cythara Anglica (which seems to have been a harp).
3Hawkins cites Nichomachus Gerasenus, who in his account of stringed instruments a.d. 60, does not name the bow. Blanchinus, in his history of the instruments of the ancients, gives a figure called the chelys (a term in after-times applied to the viol class) or, as he adds, "seu lyra Mercurii reformata." It is of the lute kind, and has neither bridge, sound-holes, neck, or finger-board, and is played on with a plectrum.
5If, however, these nations, whose languages and customs were instilled into us during our eight years' residence at our venerable old school at Westminster, had not violins and bows, they forestalled us in the appointment of a coryphaeus or conductor, who kept time either with his foot, armed with a wooden or iron sandal, or with his hands, having shells or bones of animals in them to increase the sound. How would a modern audience like such a conductor, performing thus a sort of sabotier dance, or rivalling the "bones" of the American minstrels?
7With our comparatively simple system of notation, it seems scarcely credible how the complicated and cumbrous system of the Greeks could ever be properly understood; it must alone have proved a great check to anything like rapid execution, from want of capability to express such passages. Or, if once such execution had been attempted and introduced, the necessity of the case would have advanced the notation. Their characters, though comparatively few at first, and formed from the letters of their alphabet, increased so much that they were obliged to vary the position of these letters in various ways, and to introduce numerous arbitrary signs, every mode requiring a new arrangement; and in the time of Alypius, 115 b.c. the characters amounted to
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