Books › The Violin: How to Master It, 1880 › scan 18
Scan 18
The Violin: How to Master It, 1880
10 lines. Read by computer on 23 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1at all times at 88 Court St., Boston; catalogues and information cheerfully granted on application.
3Cremona Copies.
5In selecting a copy, the novice should always get the aid of a professional player, who, for a small fee, or perhaps for the pleasure of the thing, will select an improvable instrument—that is, one with a quality and quantity of wood, and volume and quality of tone, which, through constant playing, will mellow or "rub down" into a good instrument. A violin, I may say, never gets louder in tone, however long it may be kept. But the quality of the tone so alters that, under certain circumstances, it might be thought to have increased in volume. This difference is chiefly in the carrying power of the tone—an old violin, when good, rings out in a large or even a heated hall, and actually appears louder in tone the farther you are from it; a new instrument is noisy and loud near the player, but stifled and poor in tone at a distance. A great deal of the tone producible from a violin, however, depends upon the power of the player. I have heard a masterly player perform a solo upon a wretched German instrument, softening all its horrible hardness with a smooth bow and glassy finger-ring, making its very noisiness a beauty, and its shrillness the clearest and most ringing brilliance. "Dear me," said a pupil once to me, "my poor old fiddle sounds just as well in your hands as your own." He was mistaken, of course, but there was a deal of truth in the remark. How best to elude a good tone I shall show further on. Let the possessor of a poor instrument, therefore, not repine and sigh enviously after genuine Cremonas, but remember more than half the victory must come tingling from his own fingers. To put a real Cremona, indeed, into the hands of a learner would be a positive sacrilege, as it requires a master to do these noble instruments anything approaching to justice.
7Choosing a First Instrument.
9Many begin the study of the violin, sight more or less manfully with its difficulties for a time, and then quietly set it aside in despair, never to be resumed. Bearing this fact in mind, the student need not at first expend much either upon books or an instrument. In choosing a first instrument—remembering that the study may be abandoned—it matters little what kind
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.