Musical instruments are often categorized relating to the way they work literally, i.e. wind instruments tend to be distinguished from sequence tools, etc. But an alternate form of classification, appropriate for this research, normally possible: in accordance with personal usage. With this point of view eighteenth-century tools is distinguished as 'professional' or 'amateur', and amateur ones is subdivided into 'male' and 'female'.
The 'professional' tools included all metal and percussion, and all sorts of wind devices except recorder and flute; mastering these would-have-been under the dignity of an upper-class amateur player. In Scotland these types of instruments had somewhere only in theater and military rings, when utilized in amateur shows these people were constantly played by brought in specialists.
The 'amateur' devices in eighteenth-century Scotland had been as follows: recorder (up to about 1740), flute (from about 1725), violin, cello, viola da gamba (the past as much as about 1740), harpsichord, spinet, virginal, clavichord (these final two up to about 1740), piano (from about 1780) and cittern (through the entire century but with a time period of unique popularity between 1755 and 1780). The harp and electric guitar did not achieve Scotland until about 1810.
[Note: he is talking about the employment of the European harp in genteel society inside Scottish lowlands.]
Of these, recorder, flute violin, and cello had been played only by men; gamba and keyboard instruments were played by both sexes, the second getting increasingly 'female' because the century progressed; and cittern ended up being played just by ladies. This circulation reflects a society where in actuality the men go out to operate and fulfill both as the women remain invest their own homesfor the 'male' tools are the sociable ones which fit together into orchestras and chamber ensembles, whereas the 'female' tools are lone and harmonically self-supporting. The fact women, and gentlemen, played gamba generally seems to break this rule, until one remembers the presence of 'division viol' playing, a mode of playing chords including tunes on the gamba to really make it harmonically total by itself; this is a seventeenth-century technique that might really have lasted in to the eighteenth century in Scotland.
David Johnson
Music and Society in Lowland Scotland inside Eighteenth Century
Oxford University Press, 1972
pp. 23-24
The Rise associated with the Violin
There was one major change in instrumental playing during the eighteenth centurythe Border bagpipe slowly dropped out of usage, as well as the violin took its place. 'The fiddle', blogged Leyden in 1801, '... features, when you look at the Scottish Lowlands, almost supplanted the Bagpipe.' But one are unable to time the change really exactly: the violin was being familiar with play folk-tunes around 1680, and also the bagpipe was in no way extinct as belated as 1816. It is no use assigning a date for the modification if one has got to make allowances of a hundred many years each method. (Here once more, traditional songs is compared strongly. It could be reported with a few reliability your transverse flute overran the place of the recorder in Scotland between 1725 and 1740; individuals follow fashions punctiliously in ancient music groups.) It really is likely your violin was introduced into Scotland by the upper courses, just who first got it from England as a classical instrument. There is most likely in addition an existing medieval-fiddle tradition in Scotland, that the Italian violin joined forces with and stimulated.
David Johnson
Music and Society in Lowland Scotland inside Eighteenth Century