Part 1

[Transcriber's Note: Obvious printer errors have been corrected without note. Vowels with macrons are represented in brackets with an equal sign, e.g., [=a], and those with smooth-breathing marks are represented in brackets with an apostrophe, e.g., ['a].]

MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS

Historic, Rare and Unique

THE SELECTION, INTRODUCTION AND DESCRIPTIVE NOTES

BY

A.J. HIPKINS, F.S.A. LOND.

AUTHOR OF THE ARTICLE "PIANOFORTE" IN THE ENCYCLOPÆDIA BRITANNICA

ILLUSTRATED BY

A SERIES OF FORTY-EIGHT PLATES IN COLOURS DRAWN BY WILLIAM GIBB

A. AND C. BLACK, LTD. 4, 5 AND 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.1 1921

_First published in 1888._

_Printed in Great Britain_

CONTENTS.

INTRODUCTION PAGE VII.

BURGMOTE HORNS PLATE I.

QUEEN MARY'S HARP II.

THE LAMONT HARP III.

CORNEMUSE. CALABRIAN BAGPIPE. MUSETTE IV.

BAGPIPES V.

CLAVICYTHERIUM OR UPRIGHT SPINET VI.

OLIPHANT VII.

QUEEN ELIZABETH'S VIRGINAL VIII.

QUEEN ELIZABETH'S LUTE IX.

THE RIZZIO GUITAR X.

POSITIVE ORGAN XI.

REGAL XII.

PORTABLE ORGAN AND BIBLE REGAL XIII.

CETERA XIV.

LUTE XV.

THEORBO XVI.

DULCIMER XVII.

VIRGINAL XVIII.

VIOLA DA GAMBA XIX.

DOUBLE SPINET OR VIRGINAL XX.

THREE CHITARRONI XXI.

SPINET XXII.

QUINTERNA AND MANDOLINE XXIII.

WELSH CRWTH. RUSSIAN BALALÄIKA XXIV.

VIOLIN--THE HELLIER STRADIVARIUS, AND TWO OLD BOWS NOTED FOR THE FLUTING XXV.

VIOLINS--THE ALARD STRADIVARIUS, THE KING JOSEPH GUARNERIUS DEL GESÙ XXVI.

VIOLA D'AMORE XXVII.

CETERA, BY ANTONIUS STRADIVARIUS XXVIII.

GUITAR, BY ANTONIUS STRADIVARIUS XXIX.

BELL HARP AND HURDY-GURDY XXX.

SORDINI XXXI.

CLAVICHORD XXXII.

THE EMPRESS HARPSICHORD XXXIII.

PEDAL HARP XXXIV.

STATE TRUMPET AND KETTLEDRUM XXXV.

CAVALRY BUGLE. CAVALRY TRUMPET. TRUMPETS XXXVI.

LITUUS AND BUCCINA. CORNET. TRUMPETS XXXVII.

TWO DOUBLE FLAGEOLETS, A GERMAN FLUTE, AND TWO FLÛTES DOUCES XXXVIII.

DOLCIANO. OBOE. BASSOON. OBOE DA CACCIA. BASSET HORN XXXIX.

SITÁRS AND VÍNA XL.

INDIAN DRUMS XLI.

SAW DUANG AND BOW. SAW TAI AND BOW. SAW OO AND BOW. KLUI. PEE XLII.

RANAT EK. KHONG YAI. TA'KHAY XLIII.

HU-CH'IN AND BOW. SHÊNG. SAN-HSIEN. P'I-P'A XLIV.

CHINESE TI-TZU, SO-NA, YUEH-CH'IN. JAPANESE HIJI-RIKI. CHINESE LA-PA XLV.

JAPANESE KOTO XLVI.

SIAMISEN, KOKIU, BIWA XLVII.

MARIMBA OF SOUTH AFRICA XLVIII.

INDEX PAGE 117

The Woodcuts at the head of this page (from the British Museum) represent Sir Michael Mercator, of Venloo, Musical Instrument Maker to King Henry VIII.

INTRODUCTION.

It is claimed for this book, intended to illustrate rare historical and beautiful Musical Instruments, that it is unique. Classical, Mediæval, Japanese, and other varieties of Decorative Art, Weapons, and Costumes, have found worthy illustration and adequate description, but hitherto no attempt has been made to represent in a like manner the grace and external charm of fine lutes and harps, of viols, virginals, and other instruments. Engravings have been produced, in historical or technical works; but the greater number of these are mere repetitions continued from one to the other, and have no specially æsthetic interest. Beauty of form and fitness of decoration demand more than the commonplace homage paid to simple use, and while we should never lose sight of the purpose of a musical instrument, its capacity to produce agreeable and various sounds, we can take advantage of its form and material, and, making it lovely to look upon, give pleasure to the eye as well as the ear. It is hardly necessary to say that the love of adornment or ornament is an attribute of the human race. It is to be found everywhere and in every epoch when life is, for the time being, safe and the means of existence secure. Some favourite manner of decoration is the characteristic stamp of a people, a period, or a country. The earliest monuments we can point to that represent musical instruments, show a tendency to adorn them or to place them with decorative surroundings. The Egyptians, the Assyrians, the ancient Greeks supply a record that has been continued by the Persians and Saracens, in the Gothic age and the Renaissance, always repeating, as it were, in an ineffaceable script, the precept that the hand should minister to the gratification of the eye, and satisfy it by alternating excitement with repose. And so it was, until the marvellous mechanical advance in the present century has not only caused us to forget, by its overwhelming power, what our predecessors so steadfastly continued, but has induced us to regard the ugly as sufficient if the mere practical end is served. By thus chilling the appreciation and pursuit of decorative invention, that faculty has been numbed for the time being, and there is danger of its being lost altogether. It may be answered that real artistic work is occasionally done, and there are examples of it to be found in musical instruments; a good organ case is sometimes made, sometimes a fine decoration for a piano case. If there is any hope of an awakening of the love for musical instruments that finds expression in their adornment, its promise lies in the beautiful designs that have been, of late years, so meritoriously carried out for pianos--the invention of Mr. Alma Tadema, Mr. Burne Jones, Mr. Fox, and Miss Kate Faulkner. Good decoration need not be a privilege of the rich; the old Antwerp clavecin-makers, who were all members of the guild of St. Luke, the artists' guild, knew how to worthily decorate their instruments at little cost, as may be seen in the Ruckers Virginal, Plate XVIII. They painted their sound-boards with appropriate ornamentation, and used bright colour to heighten the effect of their instruments when open. The Italians went even farther in richer details, and beautified other stringed instruments besides those with key-boards. The persistence of noble traditions is shown in the exquisite ornament of the Siamese instruments (Plates XLII. and XLIII.) and of the Japanese Koto (Plate XLVI.). It would be grievous if this Eastern inheritance were lost through the engrafting of Western ideas and reception of our material civilisation. The incentive to all such work is the pleasure found in it, and without pleasure in work the life of the worker is aimless and sad.

In describing musical instruments we can refer to no beginnings; those that may be discerned dimly in the glimmering of the historic dawn present a certain completeness that marks an intellectual advance already accomplished. The well-known Egyptian Nefer, a spade-like guitar, or rather tamboura, invited by its long neck the stopping of various notes upon its strings. As early as the Third Dynasty, it had already been so long in use as to have become incorporated in the pictorial language of the Hieroglyphics, in which its representation presented the concept or symbol of the attribute _good_. This stringed instrument, thus complex in its playing, must have been already grey with age when it was cut in stone in the monument of the beautiful Princess Nefer-t, now in the museum at Bulaq. We cannot conjecture when it was discovered that more tones than one could be got from a single string by taking advantage of the expedient of a long neck or finger-board, or from a single pipe by boring lateral holes in it, and closing those holes to produce different notes with the fingers. Even these remote inventions, certainly prehistoric, seem to require that there should be yet older inventions--those which placed pipes or strings of different lengths, or strings of the same length but of different thicknesses and tension, side by side, as in the syrinx or Pan's pipes, or the harp and lyre.

The late Carl Engel, _Music of the Most Ancient Nations_ (London, 1864), has formed a kind of Development theory for musical instruments, giving the earliest place to the drum, and the latest to the stringed instruments; those of the latter with key-boards having been invented almost in our own time. This theory has lately been reconstructed upon a more scientific basis by Mr. Rowbotham (_History of Music_, vol. i., London, 1885). The drum and tambourine, and other clashing and mere time-marking instruments, as sistrums, cymbals, castagnettes, and triangles, are on the limit of musical sound and noise, inclining, for the most part, to the latter. The drum is widely used in religious services in different parts of the world, and to play the sistrum was in ancient Egypt the prerogative of a high order of priesthood. The various Buddhist gongs resemble the kettledrums in this respect, that they have a more definable musical element in them, and we find these sonorous metal instruments widely used in China and the Indo-Chinese countries, in Java, and the Indian Archipelago. The Indian drums (Plate XLI.), according to the theory just mentioned, should be aboriginal, but the most ancient, the M'ridang, is attributed to the god S'iva, and is therefore Aryan. Her Majesty the Queen's State Kettledrum (Plate XXXV.) here adorned with a richly embroidered silk banneret, serves to show the highest point the drum has yet attained in estimation and use. On a much higher level is that arrangement of wooden or metal bars in those instruments classed generally as Harmonicons, which are especially at home in Java, Siam, and Burma, and are known to be used from the Hill country of India in the one direction, to Africa in the other. The beautiful Siamese Ranat and Khong (Plate XLIII.) and the Zulu Marimba (Plate XLVIII.) are examples of this wide distribution, and in the latter the gourd resonators attached to the bars show the simplest form of sound reinforcers, which, perfected in various Eastern instruments, such as the Indian Vínas and Sitárs (Plate XL.) has in Europe attained its crowning artistic development in the beautiful pear-shaped Resonance bodies of the Lute and Mandoline. We find also varieties of this beautiful form in the Georgian and Turcoman tambouras, the Colascione of Southern Italy and similar instruments, the migrations of which may here and there be traced along the lines of religious movements, as in Central Asia and Hindostan, in China, the Corea, and Japan. For instance, the shorter-necked lutes and guitars, the rebec, rebab, and other precursors of the viols and violins, which, borrowed from the Arabic population of the Holy Land, actually came to Europe upon the reflex wave of the Crusades. The Saracenic occupation of Spain had, however, its share in the transmission of these instruments, and of a taste for the _pizzicato_, and also of an elaboration of vocal and instrumental ornament, which has remained in the popular airs and dances of that country, and, an important characteristic of the music of the Troubadours and Trouvères, has left its mark upon our modern music everywhere. The Arab blood in Spain may have tended to preserve the use of the guitar as a national instrument in that country. A Guitar (Plate XXIX.) and a Cetera (Plate XXVIII.) made by Stradivarius, as he usually signed his name, are of especial interest as showing that he was not above making more simple instruments than violins. The beautiful tortoiseshell Guitar (Plate X.) has a tradition that connects it with Mary of Scots and the unfortunate Rizzio. In all these guitar and lute instruments, the roses in the sound-boards show a wealth of invention in design that is truly astonishing. A work of this kind would not be without interest if it were devoted only to these roses, and to those of spinets and harpsichords. Guitars have flat backs, and lutes shell or pear-shaped resonance bodies, and the former are again divided into the guitar proper with catgut strings, and cithers with wire strings necessitating the employment of a plectrum. The Cetera is the Italian name of the cither, and the one drawn in Plate XIV. is of remarkable, although not unusual, beauty. The cither to which the name of Queen Elizabeth is traditionally attached, belongs to the English family of the Pandore, Orpheoreon, and Penorcon; it is not exactly one of these instruments, but it most nearly resembles the last named. As a fine specimen of English work, in no way ceding to the Italian, this beautiful instrument, commonly known as Queen Elizabeth's Lute (Plate IX.), cannot be too highly extolled. The description accompanying this drawing, and in fact the descriptions of all the drawings, must be referred to for those special particulars that are more conveniently given separately. The Lute (Plate XV.) is one of the finest existing examples of its kind. It bears the label of Vvendelio Venere, Padua, dated 1600, and marks the culmination of that once most favourite instrument. The large bass lutes--the theorboes and chitarroni--that came into use about that date, were rendered necessary through the weakness in the bass of the contemporary harpsichord, which was insufficient as a sub-structure for the Continuo, or Thorough Bass, intended to accompany the Recitativo, then recently introduced at Florence, and forming an essential part of that Monody that was the latest blooming of the Renaissance, as applied to the latest art, harmonised music. The Venetian Theorboes (or Tiorbe) and Chitarroni (Plates XVI. and XXI.) are of great beauty and historical interest. But the lute, even when diapasons or extra bass strings were added to it, went out, being superseded by the more useful, although less beautifully toned, spinet. The latest lute instruments are the pleasing Mandolines to which fashion may possibly grant a new lease of popularity. These instruments are drawn in Plate XXIII. Both ear and eye are equally gratified in that culmination of qualities attained in a violin, in which the sound and shape are so intimately and inseparably connected that we fail to conceive the one without some mental reference to the other. The form and colour of a fine violin are in themselves so beautiful that it seems scarcely possible to enhance their effect by adding any kind of decoration, but in Plate XXV. it will be seen that Antonio Stradivari, with whom the instrument reached perfection, has successfully inlaid one of his masterpieces with an appropriate design. Another violin by the same illustrious master, in this instance without adornment, is drawn in Plate XXVI. The particular characteristics of another famous Cremona maker, Giuseppe Guarneri, who signed himself "Del Gesù," and is accounted Stradivari's only rival, are also illustrated in this plate. With forty-eight plates, however, to which this work is limited, no complete scheme can be offered of the rich varieties of musical instruments that exist, but the pictorially interesting Viola d'Amore (Plate XXVII.) and the Viola da Gamba (Plate XIX.) have not been overlooked.

Wind instruments, although they may be of earlier invention in their rudimentary forms than those with strings, as in the old-world fable of Apollo and Marsyas, are always placed second. But they have an equal interest intrinsically and historically, and like drums and gongs, have an especial connection with the sacred rites of various nations. The Jewish Shophar, a simple ram's horn, a woodcut of which, drawn from an interesting example preserved at the great Synagogue, Aldgate, London, figures at the end of this Introduction, is the oldest wind instrument in present use in the world. It is first named in the Bible as sounding when the Lord descended upon Mount Sinai, and there seems to be little doubt that it has been continuously used in the Mosaic Service from the time it was established until now. It is sounded in the synagogues at the New Year and on the Fast of the Day of Atonement. The Talmud gives ten reasons for sounding the Shophar at the New Year, which may be summed up as reminding those who hear it of the Creation, Penitence, and the Law, of the Prophets, who were as watchmen blowing trumpets, of the Temple and the Binding of Isaac, of Humility, the gathering together of Israel, the Resurrection, and the day of Judgment, when the trumpet shall sound for all. The embouchure of the Shophar is very difficult, and but three proper tones are usually obtained from it, although in some instances higher notes can be got. The short rhythmic flourishes are common, with unimportant differences, to both the German and Portuguese Jews, and consequently date from before their separation. These flourishes as used in the Ritual are the Tekiah (T'qi['a]h) [Music] Shebarim (Sh'bharim) [Music] and Teruah (T'ru['a]h) [Music] usually a tongued _vibrato_ of the lower note. The Gedolah [Music] is the great Tekiah concluding the flourishes. The shophar is usually a ram's horn flattened by heat, the bore being a cylindrical tube of very small calibre, which opens into a kind of bell of parabolic form. The notes here given are those usually produced, but from the empirical formation of the embouchure and a peculiarity of the player's lips, an octave is occasionally produced instead of the normal fifth. The fundamental, if obtained, is not regarded as a true shophar note. Through the mediation of a friend, whose assistance has enabled me to gather this information, I have heard the shophar flourishes played by a competent performer, and am enabled to give an authoritative notation of these strangely interesting historical phrases, for the final correction of which I have to thank the Rev. Francis Cohen.

Bronze horns are also of very ancient use, and existing specimens, chiefly of Celtic or Scandinavian origin, are frequently richly ornamented. Their employment appears to have been for war, for hunting, and the feast. In more recent times, their possession has been attached to feudal customs, as the transfer and holding of land, and at last through the growth of large cities they became associated, as the interesting Dover and Canterbury Horns (Plate I.) were, with municipal customs. Horns were sounded for the curfew, and an especially characteristic example of such horn-blowing is a dramatic feature introduced by Wagner at the close of the second act of his Shakespearean Music Drama, _Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg_. Earl Spencer's very beautiful ivory horn or Oliphant (Plate VII.) was most likely intended for the chase. Of other simple wind instruments depending upon the player's lips, the ancient Roman Lituus and Buccina (Plate XXXVII.) are eminently interesting examples. The Roman horse-soldier bore the Lituus, so called from its resemblance to an Augur's staff, and the foot-soldier, the Tuba and circular Buccina. They marched to the sound of instruments, the tones of which were produced exactly as they are in the trumpet and bugle we are familiar with--from the vibration of the lips, varying with the pressure and force of wind within a cup-like mouthpiece. These tones, being from natural harmonics, are not different now from what they were when Cæsar first landed in Britain, or, indeed, the first notes from a horn that were ever produced. Of modern brass instruments drawn, there are two possessing historical interest--the Cavalry Bugle in Plate XXXVI. which belongs to H.R.H. the Prince of Wales, and sounded the moonlight charge of the Household Cavalry at Kassassin in Egypt, and a trumpet that sounded the famous charge at Salamanca. By way of contrast there is the silver State Trumpet (Plate XXXV.), one of ten that were employed in peaceful service for Her Majesty Queen Victoria during her long and gracious rule.