Books › The violin and its music, 1881 › scan 36
Scan 36
The violin and its music, 1881
4 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 16. See the scan on archive.org.
1or Geige which time has preserved to us. Now, believing that the family of the German Geige played a far more prominent part in the formation of the Violin than any of the Italian or German families of the Viol, is the cause of the importance I attach to this book as a piece of weighty historical evidence in relation to the birthplace of the leading instrument. In giving this prominent position to these Fiddles, I do not claim for them a more honourable descent than that of the Viols, believing both families owe their existence to a common ancestor, which was none other than that barbarous bowed contrivance which Roger North informs us the rushy Zampogna used "to stir up the vulgar to dancing," and was played upon at idolatrous sacrifices. Whether the descent was lineal or collateral is a question of Fiddle heraldry not easily decided; but I am inclined to think the transmission was in a direct line, and that the "Chelys" or early German Double Bass of Ottomarus Luscinius, and drawn by Albert Durer, was a branch of the rushy Zampogna instrument's direct descendants formed by an alliance with the monochords, a family which preserved its lineage down to the Marine Trumpet.*
3* Mersennes says, "The instrument commonly called the Marine Trumpet, either because it was invented by seamen, or because they make use of it instead of a Trumpet, consists of three boards so joined and glued together, that they are broad at the lower end and narrow at the neck, &c. &c. Of the six divisions marked on the neck of the instrument, the first makes a fifth with the open chord, the second an octave, and so on for the rest, corresponding with the intervals of the Military Trumpet."—"Hawkins' History."
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