Books › The violin: some account of that leading instrument, and its most eminent professors, from its earliest date to the present time;, 1878 › scan 29
Scan 29
The violin: some account of that leading instrument, and its most eminent professors, from its earliest date to the present time;, 1878
4 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1say, soft and sunny Italy, is it not to thee that belongs the too modest merit of having produced and cherished the infancy, even as thou hast confessedly supported and developed the after-growth and advancement, of the interesting musical being whose history, in its more secret passages, we are here exploring? Is it a world (as Sir Toby feelingly asks), is it a world to hide virtues in? Well, if we cannot obtain direct satisfaction, let us pursue the investigation of our point a little more circuitously.
3The perfect instrument which we now delight to honor by the name of the violin—the instrument complete in form and qualities—"totum in se teres atque rotundum"—appears to have been the result of a highly interesting series of improvements in the art of producing musical sounds from strings. How long a duration of time was occupied by the elaboration of these improvements respectively, is not readily to be ascertained, nor, perhaps, would the enquiry repay the trouble—but the general order of progression in the improvements themselves, is as clear as it is agreeable to contemplate. The first great advancement consisted in the sounding-board, by means of which invention a tone was produced, through the vibration of the wood, that was incomparably better and fuller than what was previously procured, through the mere vibration of the strings. As the human voice is evolved from the mouth under a concave roof, which serves it as a sounding-board, and gives additional grace and vigour to its inflections, so does the upper shell of the violin add a power of its own to the language of the strings. The next improvement in the instrument, thus extended in capability, was the neck or finger-board, which increased the range and variety of the sounds, by giving
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