Books › The violin and its music, 1881 › scan 29
Scan 29
The violin and its music, 1881
10 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 9. See the scan on archive.org.
1Section I.—The Viol Gothic.
3CHAPTER II.
5THE Mastersingers link in the chain of musical history is indeed a most important one, and rightly has it been said, "music and metre constituted its essential elements, and civilization felt her march quickened by their influence."* It was they who rescued music from its wanderings over the earth in a state of semi-barbarism, and clothed it in the dress of civilization. The Gothic Viol, which had roamed with the Saxons to Britain, with the Goths to Spain and Italy, under the influence of the Mastersingers assumed a more definite shape, and became detached from its companions, the Pipes and Shalmes, with which it had been more or less connected for centuries. It no longer attended the minstrel in his perambulations amid courts and revels, but became the associate of honest burghers in peaceful cities.
7Augsburg and Nuremburg have been mentioned as the strongholds of the Mastersingers, and it is in the annals of these cities we discover evidence of extraordinary musical progress. At Augsburg lived Hans Froschauer, he who first gave to the world music printed from wood blocks, which Petrucci, at Venice, at the end of the fifteenth century, improved
9* Retrospective Review, Vol. X.
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