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 32
Scan 32
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
6 lines. Read by computer on 29 August 2026. Printed page 12. See the scan on archive.org.
1that of the giraffe, had a bowed instrument that may have been similar to one frequently named by the old poets and romance writers. This was the rebab, or rebec, with two or three strings, which is supposed by some to have been brought into Europe by the Crusaders; but as at the time of the Crusades the viol had been for a very long time well established in England and many parts of the Continent, it is more probable that the Saracens adopted it originally from the Crusaders. Monsieur Fetis, whose extensive musical research is well known, considers that the bow was not derived from the East, but from some of the Northern people, from whom it travelled southward, and passed into the East at a very early date.
3The Russian peasants have a rude sort of violin without any inward curvatures, called the goudok: it has three strings, of which the first is touched with the finger, while the other two are sounded at the same time by a short, clumsy bow. They have also an instrument of the guitar kind, called the balalaika, with two or three strings and a very long neck, which is mentioned by Laborde, and also by De Passenans in "La Russie et l'Esclavage," 1822.
5Neither the Greeks or Romans appear to have any authentic representations of a bowed instrument; they had principally different kinds of lyres and flutes, together with the ancient syrinx or Pan's pipes, now degraded into a common street instrument, and indeed, seldom heard at all. Mersennus and other writers of the middle ages, use the word barbiton for instruments of the fiddle class, but the barbiton that Anacreon complains of, as preferring love-strains to singing of Atreides and Cadmus, was a species of lyre, the ode being addressed to his lyre. We should have said Anacreon, or whoever wrote the
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