The violin and its music Author:George Hart Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: gection I.—he $iol (Bothic. CHAPTER II. Mastersingers link in the chain of musical history is indeed a most important one, and rightly has it been said, "m... more »usic and metre constituted its essential elements, and civilization felt her march quickened by their influence."'" It was they who rescued music from its wanderings over the earth in a state of semi-barbarism, and clothed it in the dress of civilization. The Gothic Viol, which had roamed with the Saxons to Britain, with the Goths to Spain and Italy, under the influence of the Mastersingers assumed a more definite shape, and became detached from its companions, the Pipes and Shalmes, with which it had been more or less connected for centuries. It no longer attended the minstrel in his perambulations amid courts and revels, but became the associate of honest burghers in peaceful cities. Augsburg and Nuremburg have been mentioned as the strongholds of the Mastersingers, and it is in the annals of these cities we discover evidence of extraordinary musical progress. At Augsburg lived Hans Froschauer, he who first gave to the world music printed from wood blocks, which Petrucci, at Venice, at the end of the fifteenth century, improvedupon, by using moveable type : which system was imitated first in Germany, by Ernard Oglin, of Augsburg, in the year 1507. Turning to the City of Nuremburg in the heyday of the Mastersingers, we find it was one of the most flourishing centres of commerce in Europe ; from its trade and manufactures it derived enormous wealth, which, as usual, caused art to wait on affluence. Poets, Musicians, and Painters flocked thither, to give play to their genius, by sharing in its prosperity; within its walls lived Hans Sachs—the friend of Martin Luther—the son of a barber, and himself a cobbler; whose prolific...« less