Books › The instruments of the modern orchestra & early records of the precursors of the violin family, with over 500 illustrations and plates;, 1910 › scan 12
Scan 12
The instruments of the modern orchestra & early records of the precursors of the violin family, with over 500 illustrations and plates;, 1910
4 lines. Read by computer on 29 August 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1Instruments à Archet"; Laurent Grillet in "Les Ancêtres du Violon et du Violoncelle"; Fétis in "Antoine Stradivari"; Dr. Julius Rühlmann in "Die Geschichte der Bogeninstrumente," and others, who derive the violin from the Moorish rebab for the reason that, as far as is known at present,* the bow was first used with that instrument in Europe. An equally illogical claim has been made on behalf of the Welsh crwth on the ground that it was mentioned by Venantius Fortunatus in the sixth century, the unwarrantable assumption being that as the Welsh crwth was played with the bow in the eighteenth century, and even in the fourteenth, it must have been a bowed instrument in the sixth century also, which proves to be as great a fallacy as in the case of the rebab (see Appendix, p. 490). As, however, I have discovered in ancient and in mediæval Persia (eighth cent. B.C. to eighth cent. A.D.) the two principal forms of the rebab, afterwards popularised in mediæval Europe under the name of rebec, both played without the bow by twanging the strings as in the lute, with which the pear-shaped form was practically identical at that stage, it is manifestly impossible on that score alone to accept the rebab as progenitor of the violin. But there are other and more cogent reasons for seeking elsewhere the origin of the important family of instruments which forms the basis of our modern orchestra. The characteristic in which the violin excelled all other bowed instruments was its tone; the bow, which did not attain perfection at the hands of Tourte until a century and a half after the Cremona masters turned out the first perfect violins, was common to other bowed instru-
3* The very earliest instance of the use of the bow with a stringed instrument, which I discovered after the bulk of the letterpress had been printed, occurs on a mural painting representing Orpheus in the Necropolis of Baouït (See Bibliography p. 567 under Clédat, pl. xvii.). Unfortunately the reproduction is not clear enough to allow the outline of the instrument to be determined with absolute certainty; the body appears to be pear-shaped.
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