Books › The violin: some account of that leading instrument, and its most eminent professors, from its earliest date to the present time;, 1878 › scan 20
Scan 20
The violin: some account of that leading instrument, and its most eminent professors, from its earliest date to the present time;, 1878
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1comes to. No, no; whatever the Epigonion may have been to the Greeks, he is nothing to us: he may have been a respectable individual of the musical genus of his day, when people blew a shell. or a reed, and called it music; but we cannot for a moment receive him as the patriarch of the Fiddle Family. As soon should we think of setting up Pherekydes against Paganini.
3Dismissing the Epigonion, we come to the Semicon, another pretender of Greek origin. This also, we are farther told, was a kind of violin: but we deny that he was father to the violin kind. The Semicon is said to have been played on with a bow; and yet a learned German (Koch), in the fulness of his determination to have strings enough to his bow, has claimed no less than thirty-five, as the complement of the Semicon. How could any bow pay its devoirs distinctly to thirty-five strings? Here, then, the dilemma is this: either to translate the thing in question into a bow is to traduce the term, or else the strings are an impertinence. Utrum horum mavis, accipe.
5If the word plectrum could, by any ingenuity, be established to mean a bow, quotations enough might be accumulated to prove that instruments played with bows had their origin in a very remote period. But the translation of the word into a bow, or such like thing, as we find it in the Dictionaries, arises simply from the want of a known equivalent—a deficiency which makes it necessary to adopt any term that offers even the shadow of a synonym.
7It has been stated, on the authority of a passage from Euphorion's book on the Isthmian Games, that there was an ancient instrument called magadis, which was surrounded by strings; that it was placed upon a pivot, upon which it turned, whilst the performer touched it
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