marrowbone-and-cleaver

Updated: May 3, 2025

The knowledge of music, on the other hand, is so little developed, that our good friends of the Celestial Empire might almost, in this respect, be compared to savages not that they have no instruments, but they do not know how to use them. They scratch, scrape, and thump upon their instruments in such a manner, as to produce the finest marrowbone-and-cleaver kind of music imaginable.

Ida Pfeiffer - A Woman's Journey Round the World