Bugle (musical instrument)

“ The bugle was afterwards (and still is) used by the Royal Artillery, and about the time of the Crimean campaign was used by the cavalry in the field, although the trumpet is still used in camp and quarters. The use of the drum [9] for signalling is almost extinct in our army, but combined with the fife (now called the flute) , it is used for marching purposes. Like many other musical matters connected with the British army, the state of the different bugle and trumpet sounds calls for considerable reform. ”

“ There is a sadness about the discovery of a long-neglected instrument, telling of the breaking up of the old home or of an absent one whose instrument has been cherished in memory of happy moments when harmonious sounds and beautiful music were drawn from the now long-neglected piano, harp, or violin. To its owner a simple flute or bugle is probably of as much value as an old piano, although the more important instrument may be more valuable as a curio and antique. ”

“ The bugle with its double development by means of keys into Royal Kent bugle and ophicleide, and by means of valves into saxhorns and tubas, formed the nucleus of brass bands of all countries during the greater part of the 19th century. The Flügelhorn, as its name denotes, became the signal instrument of the infantry in Germany as in England, and still holds it own with the keyed bugle in the fine military bands of Austro-Hungary.
There is in the department of prehistoric antiquities at the British Museum a fine bugle-horn belonging to the Bronze Age in Denmark ”

“ Having alluded to the cornet à piston, it may be introduced here, particularly as from being between a trumpet and a bugle, and of four foot tone, it is often made to do duty for the more noble trumpet. But the distinctive feature of this, as of nearly all brass instruments since the invention of valves, tends to a compromise instrument, which owes its origin to the bugle. The cornet à piston is now not very different from the valve bugle in B flat on the one hand and from the small valve trumpet in the same key on the other. ”

“ Fancy instead of the ding-dong of sounding brass in most village churches, that can sometimes hardly be distinguished from the locomotive bell, the clear liquid notes of a silver bugle, similar in character to one of the musical infantry calls, flung by the echoes from hill to hill, and dying faintly away over the meadows and along the river. ”

“ The keyed bugle, invented by Joseph Halliday, bandmaster of the Cavan militia, in 1810, may be regarded as the prototype of all these instruments, excepting that the keys have been entirely replaced by the valve system, an almost contemporary invention by Stölzel and Blumel, in Prussia, in 1815. The valve instruments began to prevail as early as 1850. The sound tube of all bugles, saxhorns, and tubas is conical, with a much wider curve than the horn. The quality of tone produced is a general kind of tone, not possessing the individuality of any of the older instruments. ”

“ Then we have a musician 100 with a small stringed instrument resembling the nablum (see p. 86) . The next musician, also represented as a royal personage, plays on a small species of harp. Then follows a crowned musician playing the viol which he holds in almost precisely the same manner as the violin is held. Again, another, likewise crowned, plays upon a harp, using with the right hand a plectrum and with the left hand merely his fingers. The last two performers, apparently a gentleman and a gentlewoman, are engaged in striking the tintinnabulum—​a set of bells in a frame. ”

“ Some beautifully inlaid specimens are occasionally met with. Of these there are many varieties in the Victoria and Albert Museum; among them there is a guitar lyre, on which is a mask of Apollo, an exact imitation of the lyre of the Ancients, which was formerly used by a member of the Prince Regent's Band at the Royal Aquarium, Brighton.
There is one other instrument which ranks high among the musical instruments of olden time found in British homes. It is the harp, heard to perfection in the drawing-room and the concert hall—an instrument upon which such beautiful melodies can be produced. ”

“ The peculiar triangular shape of the Balaläika is of very primitive character, the curved form in lutes and guitars being an artistic development. In a delightfully realistic Russian bronze shown at the Health Exhibition, South Kensington, 1884, the performer simultaneously holds the neck of the instrument and stops the strings with his left hand, while he touches them, guitar fashion, with his right hand, the instrument being free from any other support whatever. ”

“ Some specimens (of which we give engravings) are singularly grotesque in shape, representing caricatures of the human face and figure, birds, beasts, and flowers. Some were provided at the top with a finger-hole which, when closed, altered the pitch of the sound, so that two different tones were producible on the instrument. Others had a little ball of baked clay lying loose inside the air-chamber. When the instrument was blown the current of air set the ball in a vibrating motion, thereby causing a shrill and whirring sound. ”

“ The guitar was a fashionable instrument in England, played by ladies, in the time of Charles II. On the Continent it generally had ten catgut strings, of which two were always tuned in unison. At the present day it has six strings, the two of which are of silk covered with silver wire, and the others are of catgut.
A species of guitar is the quinterna, or chiterna, somewhat resembling a violin in shape (Fig. 45) . It was used about two centuries ago, especially in Italy, by the lower orders of musicians and comedians for accompanying their vocal performances. ”

“ Willis sounded the bugle in a manner which seemed almost a foretaste of the muse of another world. “When he hears the last bugle”—is again repeated, and the bugle accompaniment is lower and still sweeter. But at the concluding words, “When he hears the last bugle he’ll stand to his arms”—the loud, exulting and melodious tones of the noble instrument came out in all their fullness of sound, with an effect that elicited the most rapturous applause, and which words cannot describe nor imagination conceive.
How much is the beauty of music assisted by the beauty of poetry. ”

“ This however is a matter to which English bandmasters seem perfectly indifferent, although the Flügelhorn and the key-bugle are still to be heard with effect in the superb bands of Austria.
In the ordinary bugle valves are often added as an attachment, of which the bugle itself becomes the bell. ”

“ Mr Galpin (p. 75) gives a figure of a man playing a Crowd with a bow, instead of plucking the strings with the fingers as shown in sculptured Irish Crosses. What makes the figure so especially interesting, is that there is clearly no means of stopping the strings, i.e., of altering the length of the vibrating region, and therefore altering the pitch. No one, I fancy, would have guessed that the bow was of more ancient lineage than the fiddle. The finger-board, which transforms the instrument into an undeniable relative of the violin, is known to have existed in the thirteenth century. ”

“ The rollers are made of light wood and the bearings and pins which are made of metal, WILL NEVER WEAR OUT. This instrument is the Perfection of Musical ingenuity and PLAYS MARCHES, WALTZES, POLKAS, JIGS, Reels, Sacred music, selections from Operas, Popular Songs, etc., and is peculiarly arranged for playing DANCE MUSIC in perfect time. If you have purchased any other style of an Automatic Musical Instrument and have found it a disappointment and a nuisance YOU SHOULD SEND FOR ONE of the above described instruments. ”

“ The strings are twanged with the fingers or with a piece of wood, horn, metal, or any other suitable substance serving as a plectrum; or are made to vibrate by being beaten with a hammer, as our dulcimer. Stringed instruments provided with a finger-board on which different tones are producible on one string by the performer shortening it more or less—​as on the guitar and violin—​are met with almost exclusively among nations in a somewhat advanced stage of musical progress. Such as are played with a bow are the least common ”

“ With stretched-out fourth finger the player strains the slack hair of the bow, then takes up the instrument, vertically resting it upon the knees, between which the metal string-holder is grasped. Bringing the hair of the bow to the edge of the resonance body, the bow is simply moved horizontally backwards and forwards, the middle part of the bowstring only being employed. The strings are brought into contact with the bow by a rotary movement of the instrument. Sometimes only one E flat string is used, sometimes both. Double notes are very rarely used. ”

“ Besides one string of thick catgut upon the instrument, there [Pg 71] are in the inside forty-one sympathetic strings of thin steel-wire. A nyckel-harpa, a curious instrument of the Swedish peasantry, which may be briefly described as a combination of a fiddle and a hurdy-gurdy. A crwth, an antiquated Welsh instrument of the fiddle class. The body is cut out of a single block of wood, the belly only being glued to it. Two specimens of the nail-violin, one of which has sympathetic strings of thin brass-wire running over the sound-board. ”

“ Indeed, we have now scarcely a musical instrument which can be called beautiful. The old lutes, spinets, viols, dulcimers, &c., are not only elegant in shape but are also often tastefully ornamented with carvings, designs in marquetry, and painting.
The player on the viola da gamba, shown in the next engraving, is a reduced copy of an illustration in “The Division Violist,” London, 1659. It shows exactly how the frets were regulated, and how the bow was held. The most popular instruments played with a bow, at that time, were the treble-viol, the tenor-viol, and the bass-viol. ”

“ It is a question whether some musical instruments of special character should not be retained for use or be made again when that character cannot be expressed by any existing instrument. If this were done the Viola d'Amore, the Viola da Gamba, the Harpsichord, the Clavichord, and the old German flute, in the last instance with some concession to defective intonation, would find their places and be sometimes heard with pleasure. ”

“ Scissors-grinders are allowed to use a bugle—a bugle, mind you, well known to be the most far-reaching sound of all sounds, and intended to carry over the roar of even artillery, else why is it used in a battle? ”

“ The lute or possibly cittern; (2) the bagpipe; (3) the clarion or the shalm; (4) the rebec; (5) the psaltery or the harp; (6) the jew’s harp (?) ; (7) the sackbut or the clarion; (8) the regals; (9) the gittern, a small guitar strung with catgut; (10) the shalm (?) ; (11) the timbrel, 103 resembling our present tambourine, with a double row of gingles; (12) cymbals. Most of these instruments have been already noticed in the preceding pages. The shalm, or shawm, was a pipe with a reed in the mouth-hole. The wait was an English wind instrument of the same construction. ”

“ GUITAR FIDDLE (Troubadour Fiddle) , a modern name bestowed retrospectively upon certain precursors of the violin possessing characteristics of both guitar and fiddle. The name “guitar fiddle” is intended to emphasize the fact that the instrument in the shape of the guitar, which during the middle ages represented the most perfect principle of construction for stringed instruments with necks, adopted at a certain period the use of the bow from instruments of a less perfect type, the rebab and its hybrids. ”

“ As soon as Ole Bull became aware of the accident he hastened to buy the fragments. The wood of his violin was so old, and so thoroughly vibrated, that he had never been able to obtain a sounding–post adapted to it.
This post is an extremely small piece of wood in the interior of the instrument, but the inharmonious vibration between the old and the new disturbed his sensitive ear, until he was enabled to remedy the slight defect by a fragment of the double–bass. ”

“ For wind instruments we have a prototype in the human voice, and one may reasonably suppose that the trumpet class were evolved by slow process from the simple action of placing the hands on either side of the mouth to augment a shout. The harp may have been suggested by the twanging of a bow-string as an arrow left the archer's hand, and a seventeenth century play writer fancifully attributed the invention of string instruments to the finding of a "dead horse head." ”

“ It was the Hulder which Ole Bull would reproduce on the violin; but when he came to feel what really moved itself within him—what musical soul it was that craved for a body, a frame, a voice—the violin put into his hand and the received rules for its use were but ill–fitted to assist him in solving the problem. Therefore, descending from the heights of enthusiasm, he began to study the rudiments, and, first of all, the principle on which the old violins—the old master–makers’ violins—were [55] constructed. It has been said that those violins owe their excellence to their age alone. ”

“ The war drum of the Karague is beaten by women.
A kind of guitar exists among this people, and six of the seven strings which it possesses accord perfectly with our own diatonic scale, the seventh string only, being discordant. Their wind instruments are flageolet and bugle, or at least similar to them. ”

“ When playing, the musician has a long piece of wood ending in a steel spike, and at the lower end of the wood is a finger-hole. The striker is slipped upon one of the fingers of the left hand, and as the treble and bass are being played the finger with the striker upon it is bent in order to strike one of the bells. No. 2 is what the inventor calls 'a stone organ.' The old man said that one day when fishing in the river his foot caught a stone and he noticed that it gave forth a musical note, so he constructed a sounding-board, secured stones from the river, and placed them thereon. ”