Books › The history of the violin, and other instruments played on with the bow from the remotest times to the present. Also, an account of the principal makers, English and foreign, with numerous illustrations, 1864 › scan 56
Scan 56
The history of the violin, and other instruments played on with the bow from the remotest times to the present. Also, an account of the principal makers, English and foreign, with numerous illustrations, 1864
15 lines. Read by computer on 29 August 2026. Printed page 39. See the scan on archive.org.
1accomplished antiquary Mr. William J. Thoms, published in No. 47 of the "Musical World," where, however, he finishes by leaving his friend Volker in the lurch, admitting him to be a myth. As we, in common with all who have the pleasure of knowing him, must hold his learning and wit in high estimation, and, as in these "Few Notes" he says, "No catalogue of fiddlers can be complete in which there does not appear the name of Lewis van Vaelbeke as a player and maker," we must state from his information that Lewis, or Lodewyk van Vaelbeke, of Brabant, who died at Antwerp in the very beginning of the fourteenth century, was an eminent "vedelare," and, on the authority of a rhyming chronicle, written by Nicolaus Clerk, was the first to stamp or beat time. Mr. Thoms humorously commences his translation of the lines applicable to Van Vaelbeke thus:—
3 "About this time departed slick,
4 That good fiddler Lodewyk;"
6and finishes thus—
8 "He was the first to find and show,
9 To stamp or beat the manner how,
10 Just as we hear it practised now."
12We cannot, however, on the authority of the extract given—and with the highest respect for the translator—admit the name of Vaelbeke as a maker, without further authority, and Mr. Thoms himself allows the obscurity of the phrase cited for the purpose. We have already shown that beating time was known to the Greeks.
14Johannes de Muris, about the fourteenth century, would seem to distinguish the vielle from the fiddle as a variety. In describing the class of instruments he calls chordalia, he says, "Chordalia sunt ea, quae per chordas metallinas, intestinales vel sericinas exerceri videntur,
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