We remember the Duke in Twelfth Night asks a singer to repeat the music he has just played and sung:
“That strain again! it had a dying fall!
O, it came o’er my ear like the sweet sound
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odor.”
We must not despise that quaint and antique music of the Seventeenth Century drawing-room. It was very high-bred, very refined, very delicate and very poetic. It had distinction; it had charm.
But as times changed, manners and tastes changed with them. All of a sudden, so it seems, the instrument-makers, as we have seen, began to search for tone and when the sharp, piercing and shrill (so it seemed to the people of the day) violin came into being, other instruments were needed to accompany it. Gradually, one by one, the delicate viols with their thin strings and the tinkling and swishing lutes went out of fashion and were made no longer.
To-day their voices are almost unknown; for the old Viol Family is extinct. We have a new String Quartet that is distinguished for its great carrying tone,—rich, warm, sweet and vibrant.
When it first came into favor, the violoncello was used to strengthen the bass part in vocal music, particularly in church music and also to reinforce the double-bass; but for a long time it made no appearance in the drawing-room. The viola da gamba still held the first place in society.