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Updated: May 6, 2025
When, upon the well-known quest, the delightful singer Orpheus took that downward way, coming in sight of old Cerberus centiceps, he astutely feigned inattention to the hostile appearances of the multiple beast, and with a wave of his plectrum over the responsive lyre, he at the stroke raised voice. This much you know.
It is formed of a small cylindrical sounding-body, with a stick running through it for a neck, a bridge, and a single string of silk, or at most two strings. Its primitive bow was a long hairless cane rod which produced sound when drawn across the silk. Better tone was derived from strings plucked with fingers or plectrum, and so the rude contrivance remained long undeveloped.
Less pretentious "professors" are content with themselves manipulating a round or square tambourine or a two-stringed fiddle, and to many this style has a peculiar charm of its own. Each pause, however slight, is marked by two or three sharp beats on the tightly stretched skin, or twangs with a palmetto leaf plectrum, loud or soft, according to the subject of the discourse at that point.
Then took he his treasure, when he had fashioned it, and touched the strings in turn with the plectrum, and wondrously it sounded under his hand, and fair sang the God to the notes, improvising his chant as he played, like lads exchanging taunts at festivals.
Musical Instruments: the Dance. Instrumental music was common among the Greeks at games and meals, and in battle. They used no bows on the stringed instruments, but either the fingers or the plectrum, a stick of wood, ivory, or metal. The wind-instruments were the pipe, the clarionet, and the trumpet.
By the appearance they make in marble, there is not one string-instrument that seems comparable to our violins, for they are all played on either by the bare fingers, or the plectrum, so that they were incapable of adding any length to their notes, or of varying them by those insensible swellings, and wearings away of sound upon the same string, which give so wonderful a sweetness to our modern music.
One easily realizes the vivid potency of the picture when Baccio Ugolino, as Orpheus, clad in a flowing robe of white, with a fillet around his head, a "golden" lyre in one hand and the "plectrum" in the other, appeared at the iron gates, and, striking the strings of the sweet sounding instrument, assailed the stony hearts of the infernals with song as chaste and yet as persuasive as that of Gluck himself.
It is safe to assume that the instrument to which Baccio Ugolino was wont to improvise and which was therefore utilized in "Orfeo" was the lyra di braccio and that del Lungo's imaginative picture must be corrected by the substitution of the bow for the plectrum.
The orchestra generally consists of one or more violins and a guitar or two. The New Mexican guitar is strung conversely: the base-string is where we put the treble, and vice versâ. The strings are generally struck with the thumb-nail or with a piece of horn or wood like the ancient plectrum. This produces a harsh metallic sound, without any rotundity.
Le Rossignol squinted at him, and the man went into the barracks and told his wife that he felt shooting pains in his limbs that instant. "Come hither, gentle Swiss," said the dwarf striking the plectrum into her mandolin strings, "and I will reward thee for thy back and all thy courtly services." Klussman stepped to the wall and looked with her into the fort.
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