CHAPTER VII.
European Nations during the Middle Ages.
Many representations of musical instruments of the middle ages have been preserved in manuscripts, as well as in sculptures and paintings forming ornamental portions of churches and other buildings. Valuable facts and hints are obtainable from these evidences, provided they are judiciously selected and carefully examined. The subject is, however, so large that only a few observations on the most interesting instruments can be offered here. Unfortunately there still prevails much uncertainty respecting several of the earliest representations as to the precise century from which they date, and there is reason to believe that in some instances the archæological zeal of musical investigators has assigned a higher antiquity to such discoveries than can be satisfactorily proved.
It appears certain that the most ancient European instruments known to us were in form and construction more like the Asiatic than was the case with later ones. Before a nation has attained to a rather high degree of civilisation its progress in the cultivation of music, as an art, is very slow indeed. The instruments found at the present day in Asia are scarcely superior to those which were in use among oriental nations about three thousand years ago. It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising that no material improvement is perceptible in the construction of the instruments of European countries during the lapse of nearly a thousand years. True, evidences to be relied on referring to the first five or six centuries of the Christian era are but scanty; although indications are not wanting which may help the reflecting musician.
There are some early monuments of Christian art dating from the fourth century in which the lyre is represented. In one of them Christ is depicted as Apollo touching the lyre. This instrument occurs at an early period in western Europe as used in popular pastimes. In an Anglo-saxon manuscript of the ninth century in the British museum (Cleopatra C. VIII.) are the figures of two gleemen, one playing the lyre and the other a double-pipe. M. de Coussemaker has published in the “Annales Archéologiques” the figure of a crowned personage playing the lyre, which he found in a manuscript of the ninth or tenth century in the library at Angers. The player twangs the strings with his fingers, while the Anglo-saxon gleeman before mentioned uses a plectrum.
Cithara was a name applied to several stringed instruments greatly varying in form, power of sound, and compass. The illustration represents a cithara from a manuscript of the ninth century, formerly in the library of the great monastery of St. Blasius in the Black Forest. When in the year 1768 the monastery was destroyed by fire, this valuable book perished in the flames; fortunately the celebrated abbot Gerbert possessed tracings of the illustrations, which were saved from destruction. He published them, in the year 1774, in his work “De cantu et musica sacra.” Several illustrations in the following pages, it will be seen, have been derived from this interesting source. As the older works on music were generally written in Latin we do not learn from them the popular names of the instruments; the writers merely adopted such Latin names as they thought the most appropriate. Thus, for instance, a very simple stringed instrument of a triangular shape, and a somewhat similar one of a square shape were designated by the name of psalterium; and we further give a woodcut of the square kind (p. 86), and of a cithara (above) from the same manuscript.
