Giuseppe Tartini - Lettere e documenti / Pisma in dokumenti / Letters and Documents - Volume / Knjiga / Volume II

295 LETTERS 40. Gian Rinaldo Carli to Tartini I have hitherto not replied to your courteous letter of last 19 June, as only just now have I had the completion of the known business between your house in Piran and Count Orazio Fini, as from the enclosed documents must be clear enough to you. I shall be in Padua at the beginning of November, and together with the pleasure of embracing you, I shall also have the satisfaction of savouring, as you shall allow me to hope, a few sonatinas according to my taste. In the meantime, I am sending you all those observations which you have obliged me to write on music, and which I cannot deny to your friendship. I have written them according to the ideas which have arisen in my mind; but I have directed them to you, and in talking to you I expect to deserve a further right to your indulgence. The topics of our friendly disputes have led to my present rambling speech; but I would not have dared place it under your eyes, if you had not encouraged and in a certain manner forced me to send it to you: and how could I have dared speak of music to the master of the art? who has formed a new school, and who with tireless study and shrewdness has penetrated the most occult mysteries of ancient and modern music? Nature impresses on man the features, more or less pronounced as the case may be, of genius in the sciences and in the useful and pleasant arts; and lucky is that man who is not mistaken in his choice, and who decides to pursue that goal for which he has been chosen by nature; while he knows how to develop all his faculties and insist with commitment, practice, and perseverance along that path that leads to perfection and glory. You, in this respect, are an excellent example of this, as, since the first years of your youth you have, in spite of your parents, decided to pursue instrumental music, and having left your father’s house, you have busied yourself so much that every day for eight continuous hours your exercise has only been that of the violin. Therefore, it is no wonder that you made such rapid progress that already thirty years ago you discovered and defined the third sound between two unisons in a sounding body; and that examining, like Pythagoras, the proportions of the sounds, you realised that the strings of the violin had to be thickened and the bow lengthened, as you did, in order for the vibrations to be better regulated and the sound to come out sweeter and more receptive to variations. To the depth of your meditations, the merit of so much beauty and of so many phenomena discovered in music is due; among which phenomena, I will always recount the one which you explained to me with so much wisdom and readiness, when two years ago I entreated you to tell me the reason why the more one presses the bow against the strings, the less the sound is heard from a certain distance; whereas from nearby it becomes noisy and more harsh and unpleasant than usual. You told me then that when the bow is drawn with dexterity horizontally over the string, a horizontal and