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Scan 357
The story of the violin, 1904
10 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 303. See the scan on archive.org.
1Appendix A
3Tuning of three-stringed Rebec:
5It is interesting to note that only rebecks were tuned in fifths, as the later violin.
7Of the Evolution of the Bow.
9The bow, made of bamboo, is retained in India to this day more or less in its rudimentary state—i.e., the hair is clumsily fastened at both ends, and the tension permanent. An improvement came with the Arabs, who at some time or other gave their bow a head or point where the hair is fastened, and a nut fixed in a dovetail notch in the stick. In this form it was probably carried into Spain in the eighth century. After various modifications in the course of the Middle Ages, when we find bows depicted either long or short, very much or less curved, according to the use to which they were put, the stick began, in the sixteenth century, to assume more and more the familiar shape. It appears sometimes round, at others pentagonal, and becoming smaller towards the top end. In the seventeenth century, with the bow used by Corelli, Vivaldi, and their contemporaries, the various degrees of tension (which we regulate now by means of a little ferrule) were attained by a contrivance called cremaillère. It was a band of metal divided into notches; a movable loop of iron or brass wire attached to the nut served to catch the nut to one of the notches. Tartini's bow, it will be seen, was longer, and thus rendered more flexible and more serviceable for producing the great variety of bowings and dynamic shades of expression which the master introduced in his music. But only at the end of the eighteenth century, with François Tourte (born in Paris, 1747), the bow received its last, and since
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