A Popular History of the Art of Music Part 12

The viol differed from the violin family proper in having a flat back like a guitar, and rounded corners. The only individual of the viol family which attained to artistic development was the viol da Gamba, or ba.s.s viol, which was tuned like a lute, having six strings. This instrument was a favorite with many amateurs until late in the eighteenth century. (See p. 197.)

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 39.

ANGEL PLAYING A REBEC.

(From an Italian painting of the thirteenth century.)]

Still more curious was the form of viol known as the barytone, which, in addition to an outfit of six catgut strings upon the finger board, was furnished with twenty-four wire strings, stretched close under the sounding board, where they sounded by sympathetic vibration. This was the instrument which Prince Esterhazy, Haydn's patron, so much admired, and for which Haydn wrote more than 150 compositions. Its form is shown in Fig. 41.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 40.

VIOL DA GAMBA.

(From Reissman's "History of German Music.")]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 41.

THE BARYTONE.]

It is not easy within present limits to apportion the various steps by which the violin reached its present form. The first eminent master of violins, as distinguished from small viols, was the celebrated Gaspar da Salo, who lived and worked at Brescia during the latter part of the sixteenth century. The model varies, and the sound holes are straight and flat. His violins are small and weak of tone, but his tenors and ba.s.ses are much sought for. His model was followed some time later by Guarnerius. The real mastership in violin making was attained at Cremona, in Lombardy, where were many religious houses with elaborate services, and a surrounding population of wealth and artistic instinct afforded the mechanic an appreciative public. It was here early in the sixteenth century that we first find the Amati family in the person of the oldest known violin maker, Andrea, from whom Fetis quotes two instruments dated 1546 and 1551. One of them is a rebec with three strings; the other is a small violin. They are a distinct advance over the violins of the western school, but they stop very far short of the modern instrument. The tone of his instruments is clear and silvery, but not very powerful. The most eminent of the Amatis was Nicolo, 1596-1684, a son of Geronimo and grandson of Andrea. The outline is more graceful, the varnish deeper and richer, and the proportions of his instruments better calculated. His instruments have greater power and intensity of tone, and his tenors and 'cellos are very famous. But the Cremona school came to a culmination in the works of the pupil of Nicolo Amati--Antonio Stradivari, 1649-1737. This great master of the violin pursued the principles of the Amati construction down to about 1700, having then been making violins for upwards of thirty-three years. After 1700 he changed his principles of construction somewhat, and developed the grand style distinguishing his later works. He marks the culminating point of the art of violin making. It was he who perfected the model of the violin and its fittings. The bridge in its present form, and the sound holes, are cut exactly as he planned them, and no artist has discovered a possibility of improving them. His main improvements consisted (1) in lowering the height of the model--that is, the arch of the belly; (2) in making the four corner blocks more ma.s.sive, and in giving greater curvature to the middle ribs; (3) in altering the setting of the sound holes, giving them a decided inclination to each other at the top; (4) in making the scroll more ma.s.sive and permanent.

Every violin of Stradivari was a special study, modified in various details according to the nature of the wood which he happened to have, sometimes a trifle smaller, a trifle thicker in this place or the other, or some other slight change accounted for not by pre-established theory, but by adaptation to the peculiarities of the wood in hand. According to Fetis, his wood was always selected with reference to its tone-producing qualities--the fir of the belly always giving a certain note, and the maple of the back a certain other note.

These peculiarities are not regarded as fully established. The tone of the Stradivarius violin is full, musical and high-spirited. The small number now in existence are held at extremely high prices. The usual pattern is that represented in the following figure.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 42.

THE STRADIVARIUS VIOLIN.

(From Grove.)]

Stradivari established his own factory about 1680, and continued to make instruments up to 1730. The violin of 1708 weighs three-quarters of a pound. Besides making violins, this eminent artist also made guitars, lutes, 'cellos and tenors. It is wholly uncertain to what extent the peculiarities of the Stradivari instruments were matters of deduction and how far accidental. But there can be no question that the average excellence of his instruments, judging from the specimens still in existence, was much greater than that of any other violin maker.

Many other eminent artists made good violins in the century and a half from the time of Andrea Amati and Gaspar da Salo to Stradivari, among the most eminent being Maggini, of Brescia, whose violins are very highly esteemed. Still, inasmuch as the finishing touches were put to the instrument by Stradivarius, we need not linger to discuss the minor makers.

II.

Before 1600 the organ had attained its maturity, and had become furnished with its distinctive characteristics as we have it at the present time. As this instrument, from the nature of its tone qualities and its peculiar limitation to serious music of grave rhythm, is naturally suited to the service of the Church, it has remained till the present day in the province where it had already firmly established itself at the time now under consideration. The origin of the organ is very difficult to ascertain. There are traces of some sort of wind instrument before the Christian era. The so-called hydraulic organ was probably one in which water was used to perfect the air-holding qualities of the wind chest, in the same manner as now in gas holders. One of the earliest mediaeval references to organs is to that sent King Pepin, of France, father of Charlemagne, in 742 by Constantine, emperor of Byzantium at that time.

This instrument, says the old chronicler, had bra.s.s pipes, blown with bellows bags; it was struck with the hands and feet. It was the first of this kind seen in France.

Praetorius says that the organ which Vitellia.n.u.s set in church 300 years before Pepin, must have been the small instrument of fifteen pipes, for which the wind was collected in twelve bellows bags.

According to Julia.n.u.s, a Spanish bishop who flourished in 450, the organ was in common use in churches at that time. In 822 an organ was sent to Charlemagne by the Caliph Haroun Alraschid, made by an Arabian maker. This instrument was placed in a church at Aix-la-Chapelle.

There were good organ builders in Venice as early as 822, and before 900 there was an organ in the cathedral at Munich. In the ninth century organs had become common in England, and in the tenth the English prelate, St. Dunstan, erected one in Malmesbury Abbey, of which the pipes were of bra.s.s. The instruments of that time were extremely crude.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 43.

(From Franchinus Gaffurius, "_Theorica Musica_," Milan, 1492.)]

From this time on there are many authentic remains in the way of treatises on organ building and description of organs. The essential elements of this instrument consist of pipes for producing sound, of which a complete set, one pipe for each key of the keyboard, is called a stop; bellows and wind chest for holding the wind, sliders or valves for admitting it to the pipes, and keys for controlling the valves.

In his studies for a history of musical notation, Dr. Hugo Riemann quotes an extract from an anonymous ma.n.u.script of the tenth century, in which the author gives directions for a set of organ pipes. "Take first," he says, "ten pipes of a proper dimension and of equal length and size. Divide the first pipe into nine parts; eight of these will be the length of the second. Dividing the length of this again into nine parts, eight of these will be the proper length of the third; dividing the first pipe into four parts, three of them will be the length of the fourth; taking the first pipe as three parts, two of them will be the length of the fifth; eight-ninths of this again will give the proper length of the sixth; eight-ninths of this, the length of the seventh; one-half the first, the length of the eighth, or octave." This gives a major scale, with the Pythagorean third, consisting of two great steps, which was too sharp to be consonant.

The semitone between the third and the fourth is too small, as is also that between the seventh and eighth. The modern way of making the pipes of smaller diameter as they become shorter, had evidently not been thought of. Nevertheless, these directions are very important, since they throw positive light upon the tuning of the various intervals, the pipe lengths and proportions affording accurate determinations of the musical relations intended.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 44.

PORTABLE ORGAN FROM THE PROCESSION IN HONOR OF MAXIMILIAN I.

(From Praetorius' "_Syntagma Musica_," about 1500 A.D.)]

The early organs were furnished with slides which the organist pulled out when he wished to make a pipe speak, and pushed back to check its utterance. The date of the invention of the valve is uncertain, but it must have been about as soon as the power of the instrument was increased by the addition of the second or third stop. Before this, however, and perhaps for some little time after, there were many organs in use, which were committed to the diaphony of Hucbald, having in place of the diapason three ranks of pipes, speaking an octave and the fifth between. Each of these combined sounds was treated in the same way as simple ones are on other instruments, and if chords were attempted upon them the effect must have been hideous indeed; but it is probable that at this time the notes were played singly, and not in chords, or at most in octaves. We do not know the date at which this style of organ building ceased, but it is probably before the thirteenth century. There is a ma.n.u.script of the fourteenth century in the Royal Library at Madrid, stating that the clavier at that epoch comprised as many as thirty-one keys, and that the larger pipes were placed on one side, and small pipes in the center, the same as now.

The earliest chromatic keyboards known are those in the organ erected at Halberstadt cathedral in 1361. This instrument had twenty-two keys, fourteen diatonics and eight chromatics, extending from B natural up to A; and twenty bellows blown by ten men. Its larger pipe B stood in front, and was thirty-one Brunswick feet in length and three and a half feet in circ.u.mference. This note would now be marked as a semitone below the C of thirty-two feet. In this organ for the first time a provision was made for using the soft stop independently of the loud one. This result was obtained by means of three keyboards. The keys were very wide, those of the upper and middle keyboards measuring four inches from center to center. The sharps and flats were about two and a half inches above the diatonic keys, and had a fall of about one and a quarter inches. The mechanical features of the organ were very greatly improved during the next century, but it was not until the old organ in the Church of St. aegidien in Brunswick that the sharps and naturals were combined in one keyboard in the same manner as at present. The keys were still very large, the naturals of the great manual being about one and three-quarters inches in width. It was to the organ at Halberstadt that pedals were added in 1495, but no pipes were a.s.signed to them. They merely pulled down the lower keys of the manual.

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 45.

BELLOWS BAGS IN THE ORGAN AT HALBERSTADT, AND METHOD OF BLOWING.

(Praetorius.)]

Some time before the beginning of the seventeenth century the organ had acquired nearly the entire variety of tone that it has ever had.

The mechanism was rude, no doubt, and the voicing perhaps imperfect.

The tuning was by the unequal system, throwing the discords into remote keys as much as possible. In Michael Praetorius' "_Syntagma Musica_," the great source of information upon this part of the history (published at Wolfenb.u.t.tel, 1618), he describes a number of large organs. Among them he mentions the organ in the Church of St.

Mary at Danzig, built in 1585, having three manuals and pedal; there were fifty-five stops. The balance must have been very bad, since there were in the great organ three stops of sixteen feet, and only three of eight feet. There was a mixture having twenty-four pipes to each key, besides a "zimbel" in the same manual, having three ranks.

Praetorius also gives many other specifications of large organs of three manuals, some with dates, some without. They belong mostly to the beginning of the seventeenth century, and the number indicates unmistakably the interest awakened in this part of the musical furnishing of the large churches. Many points in these organs were imperfect, but the foundation had been laid, and the general character of the subsequent building settled. There was also a beginning of virtuosity upon the organ, but this will come up for consideration at a later point in the narrative.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

[Ill.u.s.tration: Fig. 46.

SCULPTURED HEAD OF COLUMN, FOUND IN THE RUINS OF THE ABBEY OF ST.

GEORGE, AT BOSCHERVILLE, IN NORMANDY. ELEVENTH CENTURY.

(1) Three-stringed viol or rebec. (2) Two persons playing the organistrum, a stringed instrument vibrated by means of a circular bow or wheel, like the hurdy-gurdy. (3) Pandean pipes. (4) Apparently a small harp. (5) Psaltery. (6) Rotta or crwth. (7) Acrobat. (8) Harp.

(9), (10) Instruments of percussion, perhaps bells.]

Book Third.

THE

Dawn of Modern Music.

THE BEGINNING OF FREE EXPRESSION IN SONG, OPERA, ORATORIO AND FREE INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC.