Bow & Bridge Violin and bow makers, as the old books printed them

Books › The instruments of the modern orchestra & early records of the precursors of the violin family, with over 500 illustrations and plates;, 1910 › scan 55

Scan 55

The instruments of the modern orchestra & early records of the precursors of the violin family, with over 500 illustrations and plates;, 1910

7 lines. Read by computer on 29 August 2026. Printed page 7. See the scan on archive.org.

1both in its single and double form, and it is represented in mural decorations and on their beautiful vases. It is doubtful whether the Greeks used the flute proper, as did the Egyptians. We do not know exactly how the flute passed from the older civilizations to the newer in Europe; it was probably made known by the Moors or the Crusaders. In an illuminated MS. of Byzantine workmanship in the British Museum (Add. MS. 19352) dating from the 11th century is a musician playing on a transverse flute; another representation of the same century occurs on a fresco in the Cathedral of Kiev, where, among a group of instrumentalists, is a man playing the flute. The earliest representations the author has found, however, are the transverse flute on Slab 17 of the Tope of Amarāvati* on the Grand Staircase at the British Museum, dating from the first or second century of our era: and the transverse flute played by a bear on one of the frescoes at Kusejr 'Amra†, cir. 8th cent. The flute seems to have been more fully developed in Germany during the middle ages than elsewhere. It existed in two forms: the direct or vertical, like the recorder and the flageolet, which are no longer in use in orchestras, and the German or transverse flute, which superseded the other form as 1720.
3Bach gave the flute great prominence in obbligato and concerted passages, and since then it has been a favourite with all the great masters. Beethoven and Mendelssohn assigned to it the leading part for wind instruments. The flute generally plays with the violin, sustains notes with other wind instruments, or carries on conversations with the oboe and clarinet families, as in the grand symphony in C major by Schubert.
5* For an illustration, see James Fergusson, "Tree and Serpent Worship." London, 1873.
6† "Kusejr 'Amra." Kgl. Akad. der Wissenschaften. Vienna, 1907. Pl. XXXIV.

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