Books › The story of the violin, 1904 › scan 35
Scan 35
The story of the violin, 1904
10 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1Story of the Violin
3mediæval Europe. But here—that is, about the ninth century of our era—all evidence, documentary and otherwise, for the existence of bow-instruments ceases, and we are left to drift on a sea of conjecture as to their earlier whereabouts.
5Are they a European Growth or an Eastern Importation?
7Are they a European growth at all, or are they an Eastern importation? Is the time of their wanderings on earth to be measured by centuries only, or by thousands of years? Such are the questions which musical historians are still endeavouring to answer satisfactorily.
9The two great nations of antiquity to whom we are indebted, directly and indirectly, for so many of our most treasured possessions in philosophy, poetry, and art, and to whom we would naturally turn first for information on the subject—the Greeks and Romans—give us no clue. We gain an insight into a highly ingenious system of music; we find descriptions of their popular instruments, representations on bas-reliefs and terra-cotta vases of harps, lyres, citharas, flutes, etc., but no sign of an instrument which even the most determined and imaginative enthusiast could conscientiously construe into one likely to have been played with a bow, much less a sign of such a contrivance as the bow itself. Equally unfruitful hitherto have been researches in Egyptian and Chaldean records of antiquities. While carrying us back thousands of
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