Books › The violin : some account of that leading instrument and its most eminent professors, from its earliest date to the present time : with hints to amateurs, anecdotes, etc., 1852 › scan 374
Scan 374
The violin : some account of that leading instrument and its most eminent professors, from its earliest date to the present time : with hints to amateurs, anecdotes, etc., 1852
6 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 358. See the scan on archive.org.
1classic proportions of Straduarius, M. Savart wisely entered into association with an intelligent practical man, Vuillaume, of Paris, a musical instrument-maker. Then—the long-studied and well-digested acoustic theories of the man of science being brought into operation, and tested in experience, by the skilful man of art, a brighter result was obtained—so much brighter, indeed, that there seems little reasonable doubt of its being possible, henceforward, to produce any required number of instruments, equal in primitive merit to those of the great Italian Constructors, and only awaiting the indispensable accession of time, for the consummation of their value; nor are we much disposed to charge Monsieur Fétis with madness, when, under a lively sense of what has been already achieved by Savart and Vuillaume, he points exultingly to Paris, as the Cremona of the nineteenth century!
3Into those deductions, drawn from his study of the phenomena of sound, which became to Savart the guiding principles towards the right construction of bowed instruments, it were too long here to enter;—but our English Makers would do well to look into those principles, as detailed in the French scientific journal, "L'Institut"—and to consider curiously the practical result, as shewn in the handy-work of Vuillaume, whose instruments, to the number of more than two thousand, have gone forth into the world, to attest the value of the system that has guided his operations.
5The adventures of this indefatigable mechanician, in quest of wood for his purpose,—wood of sufficient age and capable of giving out the proper pitch of sound—might fill a chapter. He ransacked Switzerland, entering into the meanest of her hovels, and buying-up the furniture or the wood-work of the châlets, wherever
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