APPENDIX IV.
APPENDIX IV.
MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS.
Chapter V. p. 98.—The following notice of old musical instruments will help to illustrate some of Pepys’s allusions:—
“The lute about three hundred years ago was almost as popular as is at the present day the pianoforte. Originally it had eight thin catgut strings arranged in four pairs, each being tuned in unison; so that its open strings produced four tones; but in the course of time, more strings were added. Until the sixteenth century twelve was the largest number, or rather, six pairs. Eleven appear for some centuries to have been the most usual number of strings: these produced six tones, since they were arranged in five pairs and a single string. The latter, called the chanterelle, was the highest. According to Thomas Mace, the English lute in common use during the seventeenth century had twenty-four strings, arranged in twelve pairs, of which six pairs ran over the finger-board and the other six by the side of it. This lute was therefore, more properly speaking, a theorbo. The neck of the lute, and also of the theorbo, had frets consisting of catgut strings tightly fastened round it at the proper distances required for ensuring a chromatic succession of intervals.... The lute was made of various sizes according to the purpose for which it was intended in performance. The treble lute was of the smallest dimensions, and the bass lute of the largest. The theorbo, or double-necked lute, which appears to have come into use during the sixteenth century, had, in addition to the strings situated over the finger-board, a number of others running at the left side of the finger-board, which could not be shortened by the fingers, and which produced the bass tones. The largest kinds of theorbo were the archlute and the chitarrone.
“The most popular instruments played with a bow at that time [1659] were the treble-viol, the tenor-viol and the bass-viol. It was usual for viol players to have ‘a chest of viols,’ a case containing four or more viols of different sizes. Thus Thomas Mace, in his directions for the use of the viol, ‘Musick’s Monument,’ 1676, remarks: ‘Your best provision and most complete, will be a good chest of viols six in number, viz., two basses, two tenors, and two trebles, all truly and proportionably suited.’ The violist, to be properly furnished with his requirements, had therefore to supply himself with a larger stock of instruments than the violinist of the present day.
“That there was, in the time of Shakespeare, a musical instrument called recorder is undoubtedly known to most readers from the stage-direction in ‘Hamlet’: ‘Re-enter players with recorders.’ But not many are likely to have ever seen a recorder, as it has now become very scarce.”—Engel’s Musical Instruments (S. K. M. Art Handbooks), pp. 114–119.