Chapter I: Violin Genesis

To me it has always appeared unimportant and not very interesting to answer the question, “Were or were not the ancients--by which we usually mean Babylonians, Egyptians, or Greeks and Romans--acquainted with the fact that stretched strings could be set in tonal vibration by means of horse-hair, reed, or some other fibre?” They knew most things, and how much they knew we are only now beginning to discover.

At one time we thought that even the Romans did not know that water rose to its level, but they were well acquainted with the fact.

We pride ourselves upon the triumphs of modern surgery, but we now find that the Egyptians were also great surgeons and operated successfully for calculus.

The wonders of electric telegraphy are doubtless of modern origin, but the Greeks were at least aware of the attractive properties of amber, which they called “Electron,” though they made no use of electricity, and they may very likely have been acquainted with the principle of rubbing, as they certainly were of plucking, a string in tension to produce a sound--without ever elaborating the idea in an instrument for musical purposes.

Both Fêtis and Vidal deny that any instrument of the viol tribe existed in antiquity, apparently on the slender grounds that the few fragments of pottery, papyrus, or mural decoration known to us have not yet revealed the fact. I think it probable that these savants are wrong. Like the use of the wheel, bow and arrows, bow and string for drilling holes, the bow or something like it employed for musical purposes is likely, on _a priori_ grounds alone, to be of immense antiquity, and at least as old as the knowledge of percussion instruments such as the drum, or of wind instruments such as the pan-pipes.

I don’t lay any great stress upon pictures of stringed instruments with something like a bridge taken to prove the existence of a bow, especially if the bow happens to be absent--a guitar has a bridge but no bow, so has the zither and the bandoline, which are plucked with the fingers or a plectrum. The much-talked-of Canino Vase (fig. 103, vol. iii. of Micali’s _Storia Degli Antichi Popoli Italiani_), showing apparently a sort of instrument with apparently a sort of bow, has been held by some to be conclusive that something like the violin tribe was known to the Etruscans. Possibly! Personally I am not satisfied that it is a musical instrument at all which is figured on that same vase--it might be anything, from a rattle or a torch to a broom or a dust-pan. The strongest point in its favour as a musical instrument is not the rough image on the vase, but the fact that a musician, astronomer, and doctor, by name Chiron, is seated beside it.

We probably see the descendants of any such instruments as may have existed in those times in the Ravanastron, which has been recognised by some as the oriental precursor of the occidental fiddle.

Altogether, I think that, from the musical point of view, too much time, and a surplus of barren antiquarian lore, have been bestowed on the origin of the viol tribe.

Our business begins not even with the building up of the viol out of the Rebek, Crouth, and Rotta (see “Music and Morals,” p. 382), but with the emergence of the violin tenor, violoncello, and double-bass out of that confused, tentative, and often grotesque crowd of viols and viol da Gambas, specimens of which are still exhibited behind glass in our Art Museums and Loan Collections. We have little to do with them. They are of no more living account than the Egyptian mummies in the British Museum. A few retain a gleam of practical importance for the violin collector, because they have been cut down for tenors or otherwise used up during the last three hundred years by violin makers: the others remain of interest to musicians only; like the bones of fossil crocodiles, they are curious studies in the comparative anatomy, not of reptiles, but of musical instruments, that is all.

No, it is with the distinct evolution of the violin, by which I mean the violin tenor, violoncello, and double-bass types, from the nondescript, dusky, tubby, ungainly machines, muffled in sound and dubious in form, that for me at least begins the history and the interest of the violin tribe.

The genius of these elect types is inseparably connected with song--sacred song.

Viols were used in churches to play chants in unison with the monks’ voices (probably also to assist their defective musical ear). When the singing-schools of Italy arose and divided the voice into treble, alto, tenor, and bass, a suitable viol was told off as the companion of each voice. Soon after this the modern divisions, the octave and the discovery of the perfect cadence, laid the foundation of the art of modern music (Monteverde, 1570). The violin emerged.

The endless discussions as to exactly when the violin proper made its appearance, or the tenor proper, or when the viol da Gamba got modified into the current violoncello size and shape, will probably continue to agitate those whose minds have a special aptitude for such researches. A very general statement will probably satisfy general readers, and even special lovers of the violin.

The name of Duiffoprugcar haunts this dim transition period, and although the violins extant under his name have all been discredited, and not always distinguished from Vuillaume’s clever forgeries, I remember one of the first judges in Europe, who was certainly quite alive to the tricks of the trade, showing me a reputed Duiffoprugcar (hung and labelled in the South Kensington Museum), which he then believed to be genuine. It had lost the tubby characteristics of the viol tribe; it was, in fact, an early Brescian violin, linen-lined, but its claim to be a Duiffoprugcar was withdrawn.

Duiffoprugcar was born in 1514 at Fussen, in the Bavarian Tyrol. He was an inlayer and mosaic worker. He is now known to have visited Paris, and to have worked at Lyons. There is a fine portrait of him etched by the engraver Wariot in 1562, and a curious viol is extant by him, with a map of Paris inlaid at the back, once owned by Vuillaume, and within recent years secured for the Brussels Conservatoire Museum by its intelligent curator, Mr Victor Mahillon. Mr Donaldson’s beautiful viol da Gamba is the only other known specimen of his work. There is no evidence that Duiffoprugcar ever made what we should call a violin, and very good negative evidence to the contrary. In a curious old print exhibiting his portrait, a copy of which is owned by Messrs Hill, amongst the various viols represented no such instrument as the violin appears.

It is easy to see how inevitable was the differentiation of the violin tribe from the first moment that a vocal quartet came to be conceived of. First the viol is selected to double a part, next a viol is made in a modified way to suit the part, and very soon the modification assumes the forms and proportions known as violin, viola, and violoncello.

But in the early days of violin genesis the instrument was quite subordinate to the voice; it only gradually conquered its independence with the emergence of the string trio and string quartet. It would happen thus:--

Two people would meet to sing, and the missing tenor or bass voice would be supplied by a viola; or three would meet who could not sing at all, when it would occur to them that the vocal parts might be played instead, and with even more accuracy perhaps than the very average voices would attain to.

The instrumental trio and quartet thus at once came into being.

Next, music would be written independently for such combinations, and the voices would be egged out altogether, and presently the treble or violin would show a tendency to throw the others into the shade, and at last be thought worthy of a solo _all to itself_, and thus the independent position of the instrument would quickly be established.

All attempts to date exactly the stages of this differentiation of the violin tribe are likely to be misleading.

You cannot say exactly when perspective was discovered or rediscovered by the Italian painters, it developed gradually; and so the violin developed gradually, born of new musical needs and new musical knowledge.

In the midst of the old chaotic world of viol noises that preceded it, the struggle to displace the old viol players and the slow disappearance of the whole clumsy craft is aptly summed up in the words of one who lived at the moment of transition. He writes--

“In former days we had the viol in
Ere the true instrument had come about;
But now we say, since this all ears doth win,
The violin hath put the viol out.”