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 34
Scan 34
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
9 lines. Read by computer on 29 August 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1"HISTORY OF THE VIOLIN.
3"Romanusque lyra plaudat tibi, Barbarus harpa,
4Græcus Achilliaca, chrotta Britanna canat."
6The chrotta must have been known on the Continent as a British instrument long before this, or it would scarcely have been so distinguished by a foreign author.
8Notker, in the ninth century, says that the rottà (or chrotta) was derived from the psalterion—the ancient psalterion, as he even at that early time calls it. This instrument had some similarity to the Egyptian or Nine-vite instrument before referred to, and was sometimes of a triangular form, sometimes square or rectangular, with occasional varieties of form. Notker says that the ancient psalterion had ten strings, and that the form, the Greek delta (Δ), had a mystical signification; but after it became in use by common or secular performers, they added strings to it, and made the shape more convenient (by rounding the angles), and called it the rottà, thus changing the mystical form of the Trinity. The mysticism, however, of the form, probably only existed in the imagination of Notker, and the passage is in an article "In Symbolum Athanasii." This rottà, as appears from the lines just quoted, was known long before Notker, but we have cited him as an authority for its derivation from the ancient psalterion. In a letter from Cuthbert, cotemporary with Bede, to Lullus, successor of St. Boniface, Archbishop of Mayence, written about 755, he says, "Delectat me quoque cytharistam habere qui possit cytharizare in cythara quam nos appellamus rottæ, quia citharam habeo et artificem non habeo." M. Fetis considers this to have been the cithara Teutonica, formed from the rounded psalterion; and with him Mr. W. Chappell, whose opinion on everything connected with music is entitled to much attention, concurs. M. de Coussemaker, to whose learned "Essai
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