Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/264

Rh 242 VIOLIN Descrip tion of the in stru ment. Descent of violin Lyre. VIOLIN, a stringed instrument employed in orchestral and chamber music. The body is a resonant box, composed of a belly, back, and six ribs, all shaped out of thin wood to various curves, the belly and back being scooped out of solid slabs, and the ribs planed and bent. The whole is glued together upon six internal blocks. Pine is used for the belly, maple for the other parts. The external surface is covered with a fine hard varnish of a brown, red, orange, or yellow colour, which renders the box more resonant. To this box is glued a solid neck or handle, slightly in clined to the plane of the box, and along the whole instru ment four gut strings are stretched by means of as many pegs and a tail-piece. They are tuned in fifths, thus _-__,-, _ and set in vibration with a bow, strung with IpEE^zEE horsehair well rubbed with rosin, which is held -& in the right hand, the scale being completed by stopping the strings with the fingers of the left hand, in which the instrument is held, on an ebony finger-board glued to the handle, and projecting over the body of the fiddle. The movable bridge, across which the strings are strained, forms the spring or mechanical centre of the violin, and answers to the reed in wood wind-instruments. It has two feet, of which the treble or right-hand one rests firmly on that part of the belly which is supported by a sound-post resting on the back, thus forming a rigid centre of vibration, while the bass or left-hand foot, resting on the freely-vibrating part of the belly, communicates to it, and through it to the air in the box, the vibrations which the bow excites in the strings. The belly is strengthened, and its vibration regulated and increased, by a longitudinal bar glued inside it exactly under the bass foot of the bridge. Two incisions in the belly, called sound-holes, from their letting out the sound, also facilitate and modify the vibration. The middle pair of ribs on each side have an inward curvature, to afford the bow better access to the strings. The superficial area of the belly is divided by the bridge into two approximately equal parts, for an obvious acoustical reason ; 1 but the upper half is longer and narrower than the lower, which is relatively short and broad. This device gives greater length to the vibrating portion of the strings, and hence greater compass to the instrument. It also brings the bowing place on the strings nearer to the player. The violin, as the name imports, is a modified form of the viol, an instrument constructed on exactly similar principles, though different in every detail. It dates from the middle of the 16th century; the viol was perfected somewhat earlier. During two centuries the two instru ments were in use contemporaneously ; but the violin class gradually drove the viols from the field, on the principle, which governs the general history of musical instruments, of the &quot; survival of the loudest.&quot; The primitive viol is a modified form of the lute ; and the lute is an adaptation of the small lyre of classical antiquity, the name of which (fidicula) survives in both groups of the common names for bowed instruments (fidicula, fidula, fideille, vielle, fidel, vedel, fiedel, fiddle ; in the Romance group, vidula, viula, viola, violino, violone, violoncello). The fidicula or lyre consisted of a resonant box, having a yoke (jugum or transtillum) instead of a neck, and one string for each note. Obviously, by substituting for the jugum a handle or neck, and thus enabling the fingers of the left hand to stop the strings at will, the number of strings and the tension on the box could be diminished, the scale of notes increased, and the task of the right hand facilitated. By this improvement the class of instruments denominated lyre developed into the lute class ; and by other improve ments upon the original basis it developed into the harp. 1 In order that the vibrational impulse may be given as nearly as possible at the centre of the mass of air in the resonant box. The origin of the peculiar mechanism which, when added to the lute, produced the viol, viz., the movable bridge, sound-post, and bow, is obvious. The bow is a develop ment of the plectrum employed for sounding the lyre. The bridge was borrowed from the Greek KGIVWV, or monochord. Movable bridges (t Traywyets, subductaria, ponticuli) were employed to divide the monochord so as to produce the intervals of the various scales. 2 The sole use of this in strument being to train the ear of singers, it may well be supposed that musicians would endeavour to render the tone continuous, the better to support the voice ; and this could be readily done by substituting for the plectrum a common military bow, with the string well rubbed with rosin, 3 a substance largely used by the Greeks and Italians. This supposition is confirmed by the fact that the marine trumpet, the most primitive of bowed instru ments, is simply a bowed monochord. Although we can point to no pictorial representation of the bow as applied to musical instruments earlier than the 10th or llth cen tury, it is reasonable to conclude that the bridge and bow were adapted to the monochord and fidicula during the later empire. A substitute for the bow was afterwards found in the rosined wheel and handle, doubtless first applied to the monochord, afterwards perfected in the large mediaeval organistrum, and still employed in the smaller vielle or hurdy-gurdy. The bow, however, held and still holds its ground as the most convenient means of pro ducing continuous tone from stringed instruments. The substitution of a hank of horse-hair for the single bow string dates from very early times. Except the marine trumpet or bowed monochord, we find in Europe no trace of any large bowed instruments before the appearance of the viol in the 15th century. The geige, crowd, rebec, and fidel, as the small bowed in struments of the Middle Ages were variously called, were small enough to be rested on the shoulder during perform ance, and were usually rather smaller than the modern violin. It is not easy to assign each of these names to any particular form of instrument. They all had in com mon a resonant box, either circular, oval, or semi-pear- shaped, a handle with a finger-board, a tail-piece, a bridge, and from two to four strings tuned to fourths or fifths. The pegs were set vertically to the handle above the finger board, as in the modern guitar. The bow, which was short and clumsy, had a considerable curvature, and the string a high tension. None of these instruments can have had a deeper compass than a boy s voice. The use of the fidel in the hands of the troubadours, to accompany the adult male voice, explains the attempts which we trace in the 13th century to lengthen the oval form of the instru ment. A contrary curvature, as in the guitar, was then given to the sides of the resonant box, to enable the bow to reach the strings of the enlarged instrument. This may be denominated the troubadour s fiddle. The invention next to be described formed the turning- point in the history of bowed instruments. In order to keep in place the ribs of the troubadour s fiddle, with their troublesome contrary flexures, side-blocks inside the instrument were probably used. By cutting these blocks with an angle towards the outside, dividing each side rib into three smaller ones, and giving the middle one on each side a contrary curve so as to meet the upper and Viol. The bow. Geige, crowd, rebec, and iidel. Side- blocks and corner- blocks. 2 Meibomius, Ai/ctores Mnsicse Antiques, Amsterdam, 1652, p. 89. 3 Rosin, manufactured as now from turpentine, was generally used in Italy and Greece in the preparation of wine (Pliny, A T .H., xiv. 20, 25), as an ingredient in medicine, and as a cosmetic (Scribonius Largus, Compos., 137 sq.). Violin rosin is called in French colophane and in German, colophonium, from the town of Colophon ; and Colo- phonian rosin is described by Pliny as &quot;prne cseteris fulva, si teratur alba fit, gravior odore. &quot; Good violin rosin answers exactly to this description.