I have to admit, I’d been hoping he’d like my playing. He’d told me when I arrived, after all, that when good fiddlers visit him, they might leave with a fiddle. I’d been thinking I might be leaving with an instrument, but as I looked at him, I knew I wouldn’t.
“Yeah, I’ll keep trying,” I said.
“That’s how you do it,” he said, laughing his grizzly laugh as he put both fiddles away in their double case, carefully nestling the rams’ head scrolls in their places. “That’s how you do it.”
Chapter 4
A Brief History of the Fiddle
The history of the violin and its family is one of travel, movement, trade, and evolution. One of the basic ancestors of the violin is the lute, a plucked, string instrument that originated with the ud, or oud, which Arabs had introduced to Europe during their conquest and occupation of Spain beginning in the eighth century. From this instrument, Europeans developed the lute, a pear-shaped wooden instrument held much like the modern-day guitar, with six sets of plucked strings, in the early Middle Ages.
The moment a musician first picked up a bow and used it on strings is lost to history. As Kathleen Schlesinger argues in her 1914 book, The Precursors of the Violin Family, “The origin of the violin family is obscure, and it is only by conjectures, analogies, and inferences that we are able to proceed in tracing the instrument.” Because of the resemblance of the violin’s bow to a hunting bow, however, one theory is that its ancestors were invented by hunters. Walter Kolneder argues in his Amadeus Book of the Violin: Construction, History, and Music that “if in the violin’s prehistory we wanted to include all instruments that had any of its characteristics, we would have to go back to primitive man. As he plucked the string of his hunting bow he might have become aware of a musical sound.”
Many theories of the origins of the violin point to Asia, where various bowed instruments had been played for centuries. One of the possible ancestors of the violin is the Mongolian morin khuur. Other possible ancestors include the rebab, a northern Indian instrument played with a bow, and the rebec, a bowed Asian instrument with three strings tuned in fifths that was played throughout the Byzantine Empire. After years of occupations and trade between Byzantium and Italy, Spain, and France, bowed instruments like the morin khuur, rebab, and rebec probably made their way into the hands of Europeans. Furthermore, as these Asian bowed instruments came in contact with the lute, many different forms of bowed wooden instruments spread across Europe. One early European instrument to use bows was the crwth, which was used by bards to accompany songs and stories in Ireland, Wales, and northern France. Another instrument, the fidl, from the Latin fidula, was a bowed wooden instrument held on the left shoulder. These early bowed European instruments eventually evolved into instruments more like the modern-day violin.
The violin, in short, had a messy birth. There wasn’t one first violin, but rather many hybrid instruments that combined, grew, and evolved in the hands of woodworkers, luthiers, and musicians. It grew out of multiple cultures, in many different dusty, cluttered workshops. The history of the violin is a practical history, an artistic history, a history of thought, creation, and evolution.
All of the violin’s possible ancestors, both Asian and European, were folk instruments, played by a single player for a small group of people. In Europe, however, demand had arisen for a louder, more powerful instrument. Renaissance courts and other performance venues began to assemble groups of string players who could play music with more force than a single fiddler. They needed sound. And so luthiers, the name for lute makers that eventually came to refer to any stringed instrument makers, fiddled with size and structure to create a series of louder performance instruments with a greater range of tone and sound, developing a new family of instruments, including the low-voiced viola da gamba and the higher-voiced viola da bracchio, both recent close cousins of the modern-day violin.
Sometime before 1500, it’s likely that a luthier made a soprano viola da bracchio that sounded much like a violin, but there are no exact records of that fact, and no agreement among music historians about who did it first. Some historians claim that Leonardo da Vinci worked out one of the first designs; others credit a luthier named Giovanni Cellini. Still others suggest that the mathematician Niccolò Tartaglia was responsible. Probably, however, many luthiers worked simultaneously in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries to create new, different, and continually evolving instruments.
In the mid-sixteenth century, several famous Italian makers invented and perfected instruments that came to be known as true violins. The Amati family of Cremona and Bertolotti family of Brescia were the most famous of these, and Nicolò Amati taught one of the most famous violin makers of all: Antonio Stradivari. Born around 1644, Stradivari eventually set up his own shop in Cremona. At first he imitated the violins of his mentor, but then he began to experiment with measurements, thicknesses, scroll styles, and sizes. It took him months to build each instrument, toiling away in his cluttered workshop, and as he perfected his art, his violins began to sound fuller, richer, and more melodic than any that had come before.
According to some theories, Stradivari’s measurements and design for the instrument came as close as possible to perfect. He and his shop made the finest, most well-known instruments from 1698 to 1725, and these instruments soon became prized above all other violins. In fact, they were so prized, and so expensive, that luthiers across Europe began to copy Strads. Later, violins made by seventeenth-and eighteenth-century master luthiers like Jacob Stainer and Josephus Guarnerius were also fair game for copyists. Many claimed to build exact replicas of the violins of these top luthiers, or they simply put labels in their instruments that falsely claimed them to be originals.
Even as violin workshops across Europe tried to duplicate the measurements of Stradivari’s instruments, selling these cheap copies to a growing middle class of performers and folk musicians, many luthiers, including Stradivari himself, actually experimented with various forms, sizes, and types of wood and inlays, creating a number of strange, curious, and unusual violins. Stradivari, in other words, would be the last one to have claimed to have reached perfection.
Those who have a more fiddle-oriented approach to the world understand this experimentation instinctively. The violin’s many grandparents, uncles, and cousins and step-siblings form a ragged, adaptable, flexible, always-evolving musical family that did whatever it needed to survive, and it continues to evolve.
Those with a more violin-oriented perspective, though, tend to consider the four-stringed, bowed instrument to have been perfected as much as possible by the early seventeenth century.
The division between fiddles and violins is also rooted in different styles of playing. During the Renaissance, a split grew between high and low musical forms, between performance ensembles meant to entertain courts, kings, and concertgoers, and playing by folk musicians, who could be just about anyone who had an instrument and continued the music and dance traditions stretching back for centuries.
Most histories of the violin tell the history of high violin: the Stradivari and Guarneri violins, the players who performed on them in churches and courts and concerts, and composers like Vivaldi, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, who brought the art of the violin to higher and higher levels.
Yet at the same time, a lot of fiddle playing went on in taverns, on streets, and at dances for people who never went to noblemen’s courts, fancy churches, or sit-down concerts. These lively folk traditions developed simultaneously and mostly surreptitiously beneath the other, more visible, history of classical music.
Because of their portability, violins were popular with folk musicians across Europe, and each region evolved its own particular form of fiddle music. Ireland, Scotland, England, Wales, France, Italy, Spain, Hungary, Romania, Poland, Germany, and Greece all had their own distinct fiddle traditions, which kept alive folk tunes passed down for centuries. Fiddles and fiddle tunes came to America on boats with immigrants from all of these countries, who hit the shores of this land and took their fiddling to Appalachian hollows, urban brownstones, and Southern backwaters. Each immigrant who brought a fiddle also brought an entire tradition