Books › The instruments of the modern orchestra & early records of the precursors of the violin family : with over 500 illustrations and plates, 1910 › scan 172
Scan 172
The instruments of the modern orchestra & early records of the precursors of the violin family : with over 500 illustrations and plates, 1910
6 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 108. See the scan on archive.org.
1The chief feature of the violin is, according to my opinion, the sound-chest, which, roughly speaking, is composed of two parallel boards connected by ribs or sides in contradistinction to the vaulted backs and flat soundboards without ribs of the rebecks, gigues, crwths, lyres, lutes, mandolines, like a vertical section of a pear.
3There was an ancient stringed instrument with a shallow sound-chest, of which the flat parallel boards were joined by ribs; in addition, its various types possessed bridge, pegs, tail-piece, sound-holes, purflings, and perhaps finger-board; this prototype of the violin, which differs chiefly in its earliest form by having no neck, is, moreover, identical with the fiddle and violin in name; this instrument is the cithara of the Greeks, the chetarah, or ketharah of the Chaldees, the kissar of the Nubians, the kithara of the Arabs (pronounced by the Arabs of Northern Africa "githara," by the Moors of Spain, cuitra or guitra, and finally called guitarra before the 14th century, and in England, guitar.
5This instrument, differing in construction from the lyre, but of the same family, and introduced to the Greeks from Asia, did not come to us solely through the Arabs; before their invasion of Spain, the instrument was already in use there, introduced by the Romans under the name of Fidicula (later corrupted and softened to Vihuela, vielle, viol). San Isidore, a bishop of Seville, of the 7th century, tells us that the ancients called the kithara fidicula (see "Etymologiarum," Book III, cap. 21, by San Isidore.) Now the guitar-fiddle of the troubadours has the characteristic sound-chest of the violin, incurvations, bridge, soundholes, tail-piece, fingerboard and bow, all differing in detail from those of the modern violin, of course, but similar in principle. The ancestor of the modern guitar
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