Page:Pratt - The history of music (1907).djvu/113

system. There are some indications, too, that independent instrumental music was attempted, though this was slight.

Fig. 52—Nun's fiddle, with one string, on which melodies could be played by selecting tones from the series of natural harmonics.

No exhaustive catalogue of mediæval instruments can be given. The list is too long and complicated. Various shapes and names are known to us, but they cannot always be brought together with certainty, and evidently both were liable to curious and capricious variations. In the stringed group we find elementary forms of all the well-known types—harps, lyres, dulcimers, lutes, viols, etc., in countless modifications, with peculiar special types, like the 'trumscheit' or 'nun's-fiddle'—a derivative of the monochord, and the 'organistrum,' 'bauernleier,' or 'hurdy-gurdy,'—essentially a viol sounded by a revolving wheel and fitted with a rude keyboard (see Fig. 51). In the wind group, also, there are many representatives of the flute, oboe and trumpet families, with bagpipes and Pan's-pipes, besides the organ and its petite varieties. In the percussive group there are drums, bells, castanets and clappers of all sorts. The keyboard as a means of controlling a complex instrument like the organ was already well known (see sec. 101), and its application to stringed instruments of the lyre or viol kind was understood, though it had not been combined with the dulcimer as in the pianoforte. All these instruments, except the organ, were mainly the products of popular ingenuity, though at the end of the 15th century they began to engage the serious attention of thoughtful musicians.

The more favorite instruments were often made in several sizes, so that of each there might be a graded series from treble to bass, making an instrumental choir. It seems that before learned musicians had fixed upon the notion of true harmony as the basis of composition popular music had recognized it and had begun to apply it in solid chord-effects from instruments of differing pitch. Similar experiments were of course made with voices. Such efforts were essentially diverse from those of true counterpoint, since the several voice-parts were not developed independently or equally, but as constituents in the massive or total effect. It would appear, therefore, that the mediæval eagerness for concerted instrumental effects is memorable, not simply because it hastened the maturity of leading solo instruments, like the violin, but because it involved some recognition of true harmony as distinct from counterpoint.