Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XII.djvu/83

 MUSIC 75 When the violin is well played, the fundamental or lowest harmonic comes out with force, and the harmonics up to the sixth are feebler than in the cases of the guitar, harp, or piano ; but the sixth and higher harmonics are stronger than in the case of the latter instruments. On examining with a vibration microscope the forms of the vibrations of the strings, Helm- holtz found that in instruments of the highest excellence these forms remained constant du- ring the whole duration of the tone. To this great regularity in the vibrations he attributed the purity of the sounds of old instruments ; and for the same reason the strings can be sounded with more force. In the piano the sounds are composite; the lower harmonics are relatively stronger than in the violin, but the harmonics above the sixth, which in the main form dissonant combinations with those below the sixth, are purposely prevented from appearing in the sounds of this instrument, by causing the hammers to strike the strings at points distant from the ends of the strings about one seventh of their length. The sounds of the harp and guitar differ from those of the piano ; for in these instruments we have catgut strings which are pulled aside from their po- sitions of equilibrium, and then allowed to vi- brate freely ; in such circumstances the higher harmonics, which appear in the first swings of the cords, soon disappear from their sounds. But no instrument emits sounds so smooth, so clear, and so touching as those of the human voice. The voices of men are classed as bass, barytone, and tenor ; those of women as con- tralto, mezzo-soprano, and soprano. The posi- tion on the musical scale and the range of these voices are given as follows in musical notation : Bass. Barytone. Tenor. Contralto. Mezzo-soprano. Soprano. We thus see that ordinary voices do not in- clude two full octaves. The range from the lower F of the bass to the higher G of the soprano is a little more than three octaves. These limits, however, have been extended in exceptional cases. Prsetorius, in his Syntagma Musicum, says that in the 16th century, in the time of Orlando di Lasso, there were at the court of Bavaria three basses, the brothers Fischer and one Gassner, who sang the F_i ; while the highest note ever recorded is that attained by Lucrezia Ajugari, called La Bastardella. 1 cv D I _^ i fni 1 ' v U 1 3 FISCHER. BASTARDELLA. Mozart, who heard her at Parma in 1770, gives several passages which she sang for him. We copy the last of them, which ends in 8 : She trilled on the D 6 and performed other ex- traordinary feats. Mozart's father says that La Bastardella sang these passages with a little less force than the lower notes, but that her voice remained as pure as a flute. She could descend easily as far as G a. Kuhlau wrote for a songstress who astonished St. Petersburg in 1823 the part of Adelaide in his opera of Le chateau des brigands. The dominant air in the third act reaches as high' as A 6. " At one representation, just as she was about to give the perilous note, the leader of the orchestra looked at her fixedly, which so disconcerted her that she gave 6 ." The voice of Gaspard Forster embraces three octaves, from A_i to A 5 ; while that of the younger of the Sessi sisters extends through three octaves and a half, from 2 to F 6. Catalani's voice had likewise a compass of three and a half oc- rs 1 f f 1 1 ^ ^ i fc^~ 1 E3 HI -* i 3 taves, as also had the voice of Farinelli, who went from A to Ds. FORSTER. FARINELLI. Very remarkable heights have likewise been reached by Nilsson and Oarlotta Patti. At the age of puberty the glottis of man suddenly enlarges, and the voice ordinarily descends in pitch an octave. This change does not take place in castrates ; their voices remain as in their childhood, and are distinguished by an in- describable flute-like quality. But cases are on
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