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Bowed
stringed instrument, the highest pitched member of the violin family.
Other members of the violin family are the viola, cello, and double
bass.
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The bow is a narrow, slightly incurved stick of Pernambuco about
75 cm (about 30 in) long, with a band of horsehair stretched from end
to end of the bowstick. The violin has four strings tuned a fifth
apart, to the notes g, d', a', e''. On early violins the strings were
of pure gut. Today they may be of gut, gut wound with aluminum or
silver, steel, or perlon.
Construction
and Playing
The main parts of the violin are the front, also called the belly, top,
or soundboard, usually made of well-seasoned spruce; the back, usually
made of well-seasoned maple; and the ribs, neck, fingerboard, pegbox,
scroll, bridge, tailpiece, and f-holes, or soundholes. The front, back,
and ribs are joined together to form a hollow sound box. The sound box
contains the sound post, a thin, dowel-like stick of wood wedged inside
underneath the right side of the bridge and connecting the front and
back of the violin; and the bass-bar, a long strip of wood glued to the
inside of the front under the left side of the bridge. The sound post
and bass-bar are important for the transmission of sound, and they also
give additional support to the construction. The strings are fastened
to the tailpiece, rest on the bridge, are suspended over the
fingerboard, and run to the pegbox, where they are attached to tuning
pegs that can be turned to change the pitch of the string. The player
makes different pitches by placing the left-hand fingers on the string
and pressing against the fingerboard. The strings are set in vibration
and produce sound when the player draws the bow across them at a right
angle near the bridge.
Among the prized characteristics of the violin are its singing tone and
its potential to play rapid, brilliant figurations as well as lyrical
melodies. Violinists can also create special effects by means of the
following techniques: pizzicato, plucking the strings; tremolo, moving
the bow rapidly back and forth on a string; sul ponticello, playing
with the bow extremely close to the bridge to produce a thin, glassy
sound; col legno, playing with the wooden part of the bow instead of
with the hair; harmonics, placing the fingers of the left hand lightly
on certain points of the string to obtain a light, flutelike sound; and
glissando, steadily gliding the left-hand fingers up and down along the
string to produce an upward- or downward-sliding pitch.
History
The violin emerged in Italy in the early 1500s and seems to have
evolved from two medieval bowed instruments—the fiddle, also
called viele or fiedel, and the rebec—and from the
Renaissance
lira da braccio (a violinlike instrument with off-the-fingerboard drone
strings). Also related, but not a direct ancestor, is the viol, a
fretted, six-string instrument that appeared in Europe before the
violin and existed side by side with it for about 200 years.
The earliest important violin makers were the northern Italians Gasparo
da Salò (1540-1609) and Giovanni Maggini (1579-c. 1630) from
Brescia and Andrea Amati from Cremona. The craft of violin making
reached unprecedented artistic heights in the 17th and early 18th
centuries in the workshops of the Italians Antonio Stradivari and
Giuseppe Guarneri, both from Cremona, and the Austrian Jacob Stainer.
Compared with the modern instrument, the early violin had a shorter,
thicker neck that was less angled back from the violin's front; a
shorter fingerboard; a flatter bridge; and strings made solely of gut.
Early bows were somewhat different in design from modern ones. These
construction details were all modified in the 18th and 19th centuries
to give the violin a louder, more robust, more brilliant tone. A number
of 20th-century players have restored their 18th-century instruments to
the original specifications, believing them more suited for early music.
Used at first to accompany dancing or to double voice parts in vocal
music, the violin was considered an instrument of low social status. In
the early 1600s, however, the violin gained prestige through its use in
operas such as Orfeo (1607), by the Italian composer Claudio
Monteverdi, and through the French king Louis XIII's band of musicians,
the 24 violons du roi ("the king's 24 violins," formed in 1626). This
growth in stature continued throughout the baroque period (circa
1600-c. 1750) in the works of many notable composer-performers,
including Arcangelo Corelli, Antonio Vivaldi, and Giuseppe Tartini in
Italy and Heinrich Biber, Georg Philipp Telemann, and Johann Sebastian
Bach in Germany. The violin became the principal force in the
instrumental genres then current—the solo concerto, concerto
grosso, sonata, trio sonata, and suite—as well as in opera.
By
the mid-18th century the violin was one of the most popular solo
instruments in European music. Violins also formed the leading section
of the orchestra, the most important instrumental ensemble to emerge in
both the baroque and classical (circa 1750-c. 1820) eras; and in the
modern orchestra—still the most important instrumental
ensemble
in Western music—the violin family continues to account for
more
than half the players. The predominant chamber-music ensemble, the
string quartet, consists of two violins, viola, and cello.
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