Books › The Violin: How to Master It, 1880 › scan 10
Scan 10
The Violin: How to Master It, 1880
6 lines. Read by computer on 23 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1There is not time for that. The reader can only make a dash at it, glancing at the first in the phrase, and then hastily following the form or outline of the notes on the stave to the last, thus getting a picture of the music on the mind, and while executing it, may be busy photographing what follows. That is impossible with the Sol-fa Notation. The letters representing the notes run on in an even line, and cannot be grouped even into syllables; they must be read singly and separately—therefore slowly; they speak to the mind more than to the eye; they cannot be read mechanically. For this reason the Sol-fa Notation must be condemned unflinchingly as instrumental music.
3How to Master the Old Notation in Two Lessons.
5That was the substance of my answer to the pupil I have alluded to; but at the same time I undertook to prove to him practically that, for instrumental music, the old Notation could be learned in a shorter time that the Sol-fa. For this purpose I drew five lines on a blank sheet of paper—and the student who wishes to follow me may do the same—then placed the G clef at the beginning, with two ledger lines above and two below the stave. I then wrote the names of the notes, G, A, B, C, &c., on their respective lines or spaces, from G on the fourth string to D on the first. I then took the violin in my hand and showed him that the four strings were named, G, D, A and E, and the place where these were found on the stave. This gave him an intelligible anchorage for his ideas. I then showed him how the intervening notes were got by stopping the strings with the first, second and third fingers; and then, to give him a firmer hold of the new study, I showed him how the notes on the five lines and spaces, when read from the top downwards, give the words FED and BAG, and the spaces when read upwards gave the word FACE. "Now," I added, "sit down for half an hour, and learn off by rote, as you would a school task, the names of these notes and the lines or spaces they fall on, so as to be able to tell me the name of the note and how it is got on the violin the moment I point to it on the stave." I then left him, and in less than the allotted time the difficulty
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