Scan 128
The violin & its story : or the history & construction of the violin, 1905
10 lines. Read by computer on 29 September 2026. Printed page 112. See the scan on archive.org.
1above the fingerboard, and so "nicked" that more room is left for the free vibrations of the G and D strings than for the A and E.
3The Bow.*
5Like the violin itself, the bow has passed through its own stages of development. As bowed instruments have improved, so also has the bow itself been brought ever nearer to perfection. The improvements in the bow, however, reached their highest point a century later than the violin was perfected; and both violin and bow have reached the point beyond which no further betterment is possible.
7In its original form, the bow with which the Rebek was played, greatly resembled its namesake used in battle. The stick was very much bent, and a string or piece of gut was tied to each end. In the thirteenth century the germs of a nut and of a head began to appear; and this favours the presumption that, even thus early, the bow was made with hair stretched from end to end; and also, that the stick had become much less curved than was previously the case. In the third phase of its development, the bow assumed a still less curved form; the head has become well developed, while the nut is no longer cut from the same piece of wood as the bow itself, but has become a distinct member by itself, which is secured to the stick by wire, and on the back of the stick are pieces of toothed metal to which this wire can be fastened so as to obtain the required tension on the hair. Such a bow was used by Corelli (1653-1713) and by Vivaldi (died 1743). These two masters, who flourished at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries, did not feel the necessity for a bow with a flexible stick, because the style of their play, corres-
9* Abele's work gives the excellent series of sketches included in Fig. 26, but makes no reference to them in his text. He probably assumes that the intelligence of his readers will understand that the drawings represent the development of the bow from 1620 to 1790.—Translator.
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