Violin

• 1. Introduction

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  The violin has been with us since 16th-century Italy, and yet it remains one of the most contested instruments ever made. At the heart of that contest sits a question that has stumped scientists for centuries: why do the instruments built by the Stradivari, Guarneri, and Amati families in the towns of Brescia and Cremona between the 1500s and 1700s still sound like nothing else in the world? On the 20th of June 2011, one of those instruments, the Lady Blunt, sold at Tarisio Auctions for nine point eight million pounds. That is the current record for a Stradivari violin. What makes a plank of spruce and maple worth that much? And how did a relatively small bowed instrument, barely 356 millimetres of body, become the beating heart of Western classical music, Indian classical traditions, jazz, folk, and progressive rock all at once? This is the story of an instrument that refuses to stay in one place.

• 2. Origins and Etymology

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  The word violin was first used in English in the 1570s, borrowed from the Italian violino, a diminutive of viola. That word viola traces back through Old Provencal and Medieval Latin to vitula, possibly the name of the Roman goddess of joy, or from the Latin verb vitulari, meaning to cry out in joy or exaltation. The instrument itself is far older than its English name. The earliest stringed instruments were mostly plucked, much like the Greek lyre. Two-stringed bowed instruments, strung and played with horsehair, appear to have originated among the nomadic equestrian cultures of Central Asia, in forms closely resembling the modern Mongolian Morin huur and the Kazakh Kobyz. Variants likely spread along east-west trading routes into the Middle East and the Byzantine Empire. The rebec, the fiddle, and the lira da braccio are generally regarded as the ancestors of the violin. The first makers of violins probably drew from the vielle and the lira da braccio, both of which had Byzantine roots. The word fiddle, meanwhile, arrived in English in the late fourteenth century, coming from Old English fithele and related cognates in Old Norse, Dutch, and Old High German, all of uncertain origin. One leading suggestion ties fiddle back to the same Medieval Latin root, vitula, that gave us viola and violin.

• 3. The Golden Age of Making

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  The violin in its present form emerged in early 16th-century northern Italy, and the earliest pictures of the instrument, showing three strings rather than four, appear in Italian art around 1530. The earliest detailed written description, including the instrument's tuning, comes from the Epitome musical by Jambe de Fer, published in Lyon in 1556. Within a few years, the instrument had attracted royal attention: the French king Charles IX ordered Andrea Amati to construct twenty-four violins for him in 1560. One of those instruments, known as the Charles IX, is the oldest surviving violin, and it now rests in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Another remarkable survival is The Messiah, made by Antonio Stradivari in 1716, which remains pristine and is also housed in the Ashmolean. The finest Renaissance carved and decorated violin is considered to be the Gasparo da Salo, made around 1574, which later passed to Ferdinand II, Archduke of Austria, and from 1841 was played by the Norwegian virtuoso Ole Bull for forty years and thousands of concerts. The luthiers working in Brescia and Cremona during this period established schools that shaped everything that followed. The Amati family was active in Cremona from 1550 to 1740, the Guarneri family from 1626 to 1744, and the Stradivari family from 1644 to 1737. In Brescia, the Gasparo da Salo family was active from 1530 to 1615, and Giovanni Paolo Maggini, a student of Gasparo da Salo, worked from 1600 to 1630. Significant structural changes arrived in the 18th century: the neck was lengthened and angled more sharply toward the back of the instrument, strings became heavier, and the bass bar inside the body was made more robust. Most surviving old instruments have been modified in these ways and are therefore in a substantially different condition than when they left their makers' hands.

• 4. Anatomy of Sound

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  Spruce, particularly Norway spruce, forms the top of the violin, also called the soundboard or belly. The back and ribs are typically maple, often chosen for a matching striped figure known as flame, fiddleback, or tiger stripe. The neck is also usually maple, carrying a fingerboard of ebony, preferred for its hardness and resistance to wear. The characteristic hourglass shape is not simply aesthetic: its two upper bouts, two lower bouts, and two concave C-bouts at the waist provide clearance for the bow. The arched shape, the thickness of the wood, and the graduation, meaning the varying thickness profile across the plates, all govern the instrument's voice. Luthiers occasionally use Chladni patterns, which are the shapes made by sand or glitter sprinkled on the vibrating plates, to verify their work before the instrument is assembled. Hide glue, rather than common white glue, holds most joints together. It makes a thinner bond, is reversible with hot water when disassembly is needed, and fresh hide glue adheres to old hide glue, so more original wood can be preserved during repairs. The sound post, sometimes called the soul post, is a precisely fitted dowel that stands inside the instrument near the treble foot of the bridge. It transmits vibration between the top and back and influences how both plates move. Running around the edge of the spruce top is the purfling, a decorative strip that also provides protection against cracks starting at the edge and allows the top to flex more independently of the rib structure. Painted-on faux purfling is generally a sign of a lower-quality instrument. A typical violin bow may be 75 centimetres overall and weigh about 60 grams. Bow hair traditionally comes from the tail of a grey male horse, and solid rosin is rubbed onto it to create the friction that sets the strings vibrating.

• 5. Technique and the Player's Hand

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  Left-hand technique on the violin is built around what players call positions. First position, closest to the pegbox, is where most beginners start; the lowest note available there in standard tuning is an open G3, and the highest note reachable with the fourth finger on the E string is a B5. Moving the hand up the neck shifts the player into second position, then third, and so on up to a practical limit around thirteenth position. The upper boundary of the instrument's range is determined largely by the player's skill: a skilled violinist may play more than two octaves on a single string and four octaves on the instrument as a whole. Notes above E7 are considered beyond normal orchestral use, though some players can reach C8. Vibrato, the subtle pulsating variation in pitch produced by the left hand and arm, is one of the most personal elements of playing. Most violinists oscillate the pitch slightly below the note, because perception tends to register the highest pitch in a varying sound. Vibrato does little to hide an out-of-tune note; intonation must come first. Double stopping, sounding two strings simultaneously, is possible across intervals including thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, and octaves. Where three or four notes are required together, the player typically breaks the chord, sounding the lower notes first before rolling quickly to the upper ones, though the instrument's natural resonance creates the impression of simultaneous voicing. Scordatura, the practice of tuning the strings to a non-standard arrangement, has a long history in classical composition. Camille Saint-Saens' Danse Macabre requires the solo violin's E string to be tuned down to impart an eerie quality. Bela Bartok's Contrasts retools both the E string and the G string. Niccolò Paganini's First Violin Concerto directs all four strings to be raised a semitone. Harmonics, produced by lightly touching the string at a node without pressing it down, yield higher, crystalline tones. Two comprehensive treatises on violin harmonics are Henryk Heller's seven-volume Theory of Harmonics, published by Simrock in 1928, and Michelangelo Abbado's five-volume Tecnica dei suoni armonici, published by Ricordi in 1934.

• 6. The Instrument Across Musical Worlds

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  In classical music since the Baroque era, violins have typically divided into two orchestral sections, the first violins carrying the melody in higher positions and the second violins playing harmony or accompaniment. Joe Venuti, one of the first jazz violinists, documented solo jazz violin use in the first decades of the 20th century, and his collaborations with guitarist Eddie Lang in the 1920s helped establish the instrument in that tradition. Stéphane Grappelli, Stuff Smith, Regina Carter, and Jean-Luc Ponty are among those who followed. The Swiss-Cuban violinist Yilian Canizares blends jazz with Cuban music. In Indian classical music, the violin is typically tuned so that the string pairs form sa-pa, meaning do-sol, intervals an octave apart. The tonic is not fixed but adjusted to suit the vocalist or lead player, and in the South Indian style, a common tuning is D-A-D-A. In the North Indian Hindustani style, the string order is reversed to Pa-Sa-Pa-Sa. The player sits cross-legged with the scroll resting on the foot, a posture that frees the left hand to move across the entire fingerboard. In Iranian classical music, the tuning shifts from one Dastgah to another: Dastgah-h Esfahan uses E-A-E-A, while Dastgāh-e Mahur uses E-A-D-A. In popular music, strings were a major presence through the swing era from 1935 to 1945 and returned prominently in soul music in the late 1960s, with Motown recordings of the late 1960s and 1970s relying heavily on them. When electronically produced music expanded in the 1980s, synthesizers began to substitute for strings. Vanessa-Mae, who calls her style violin techno-acoustic fusion, was named the wealthiest entertainer under 30 in the UK in 2006. Lindsey Stirling plays the violin alongside electronic and dubstep production, and indie bands including Arcade Fire use the instrument extensively. In progressive rock, groups including Electric Light Orchestra, King Crimson, Kansas, and Gentle Giant have given the violin a foothold outside the classical world.