The head, 1 in. long and 7⁄16 in. wide at the plate, is cut in one piece with the stick, an operation which requires delicate workmanship; otherwise the head is liable to snap at this point during a sforzando passage. The head has a chamber and wedge contrivance similar to that of the nut, in which the other end of the hair is immovably fixed. The hair on the face of the head is protected by a metal or ivory plate.
The model bow here described, elaborated by François Tourte as long ago as between 1775 and 1780 according to Fétis,[5] or between 1785 and 1790 according to Vidal,[6] has not since been surpassed.
That the violin and the bow form one inseparable whole becomes evident when we consider the history of the forerunners of the viol family: without the bow the ancestor of the violin would have remained a guitar; the bow would not have reached its present state of perfection had it been required only for instruments of the rebec and vielle type. As soon as the possibilities of the violin were realized, as a solo instrument capable, through the agency of the bow, of expressing the emotions of the performer, the perfecting of the bow was prosecuted in earnest until it was capable of responding to every shade of delicate thought and feeling. This accounts in a measure for the protracted development of the bow, which, although used long before the violin had been evolved, did not reach a state of perfection at the hands of Tourte until more than a century and a half after the Cremona master had given us the violin.
The question of the origin of the bow still remains a matter of conjecture. Its appearance in western Europe seems to have coincided with the conquest of Spain by the Moors in the 8th century, and the consequent impetus their superior culture gave to arts and sciences in the south-west of Europe. We have, however, no well-authenticated representation of the bow before the 9th century in Europe; the earliest is the bow illustrated along with the Lyra Teutonica by Martin Gerbert[7], the representation being taken from a MS. at the monastery of St Blaise, dating in his opinion from the 9th century. On the other hand, Byzantine art of the 9th and 11th centuries[8] reveals acquaintance with a bow far in advance of most of the crude contemporary specimens of western Europe. The bow undoubtedly came from the East, and was obviously borrowed by the Greeks of Asia Minor and the Arabs from a common source—probably India, by way of Persia. The earliest representation of a bow yet discovered is to be found among the fine frescoes in one of the chapels of the monastery of Bawit[9] in Egypt. The mural paintings in question were the work of many artists, covering a considerable period of time. The only non-religious subject depicted is a picture of a youthful Orpheus, assigned by Jean Clédat to some date not later than the 8th century A.D., but more probably the work of a 6th-century artist. Orpheus is holding an instrument, which appears to be a rebab, against his chin, in the act of bowing and stopping the strings. The bow is similar in shape to one shown in the Psalter of Labeo Notker, Leipzig, 10th century, mentioned farther on. On Indian sculptures of the first centuries of our era, such as the Buddhist stupas of Amaravati, the risers of the topes of Jamal-Garhi, in the Yusafzai district of Afghanistan (both in the British Museum), on which stringed instruments abound, there is no bow. The bow has remained a primitive instrument in India to this day; a Hindu tradition assigns its invention to Ravanon, a king of Ceylon, and the instrument for which it was invented was called ravanastron; a primitive instrument of that name is still in use in Hindustan[10]. F.J. Fétis[11], Antoine Vidal[12], Edward Heron-Allen[13], and others have given the question some consideration, and readers who wish to pursue the matter farther are referred to their works.
There is thus no absolute proof of the existence of the bow in primitive times. The earliest bow known in Europe was associated with the rebab (q.v.), the most widely used bowed instrument until the 12th century. The development of this instrument can be traced with some degree of certainty, but it is quite impossible to decide at what date or in what place the use of the bow was introduced. The bow developed very slowly in Europe and remained a crude instrument as long as it was applied to the rebab and its hybrids. Its progress became marked only from the time when it was applied to the almost perfect guitar (q.v.), which then became the guitar fiddle (q.v.), the immediate forerunner of the viols.
| Drawn from the ivory cover of the Lothair Psalter,
by permission of Sir Thomas Brooke. Fig. 1.—Earliest Bow of the Crémaillère Type (c. 11th century). |
The first improvement on the primitive arched bow was to provide some sort of handle in a straight line with the hair or string of the bow, such as is shown in the MS. translation of the Psalms by Labeo Notker, late 10th century, in the University library, Leipzig.[14] The length of the handle was often greatly exaggerated, perhaps by the fancy of the artist. Another handle (see Bodleian Library MS., N.E.D. 2, 12th century) was in the form of a hilt with a knob, possibly a screw-nut, in which the arched stick and the hair were both fixed. The first development of importance influencing the technique of stringed instruments was the attempt to find some device for controlling the tension of the hair. The contrivance known as crémaillère, which was the first step in this direction, seems to have been foreshadowed in the bows drawn in a quaint MS. of the 14th century in the British Museum (Sloane 3983, fol. 43 and 13) on astronomy. Forming an obtuse angle with the handle of the bow is a contrivance shaped like a spear-head which presumably served some useful purpose; if it had notches (which would be too small to show in the drawing), and the hair of the bow was finished with a loop, then we have here an early example of a device for controlling the tension. Another bow in the same MS. has two round knobs on the stick which may be assumed to have served the same purpose.
A very early example of the crémaillère bow (fig. 1) occurs on a carved ivory plate ornamenting the binding of the fine Carolingian MS. Psalter of Lothair (A.D. 825), for some time known as the Ellis and White Psalter, but now in the library of Sir Thomas Brooke at Armitage Bridge House. The carved figure of King David, assigned from its characteristic pose and the treatment of the drapery to the 11th century, holds a stringed instrument, a rotta of peculiar shape, which occurs twice in other Carolingian MSS.[15] of the 9th century, but copied here without understanding, as though it were a lyre with many strings. The artist has added a bow with crémaillère attachment, which is startling if the carving be accurately placed in the 11th century. The earliest representation of a crémaillère bow, with this exception, dates from the 15th century, according to Viollet-le-Duc, who merely states that it was copied from a painting.[16] Fétis (op. cit. p. 117) figures a crémaillère bow which he styles “Bassani, 1680.” Sebastian Virdung draws a bow for a tromba marina, with the hair and stick bound together with waxed cord. The hair appears to be kept more or less tense by means of a wedge of wood or other material forced in between stick and hair, the latter bulging slightly at this point like the string of an archery bow when the arrow is in position; this contrivance may be due to the fancy of the artist.
| Drawn from bows the property of William E. Hill & Sons. Fig. 2.—A, B, Tartini Bows; C, Tourte Bow. |
The invention of a movable nut propelled by a screw is ascribed to the elder Tourte (fig. 2); had we not this information on the best authority (Vuillaume and Fétis), it might be imagined that some of the bows figured by Mersenne,[17] e.g. the bass viol bow KL (p. 184), and another KLM (p. 192), had a movable nut and screw; the nut is clearly drawn astride the stick as in the modern bow. Mersenne explains (p. 178) the construction of the bow, which consists of three parts: the bois, bâton or brin, the soye, and the demi-roüe or hausse. The term “half-wheel” clearly indicates that the base of the nut was cut round so as to fit round the stick. In the absence of any allusion to such ingenious mechanism as that of screw and nut, we must infer that the drawing is misleading and that the very decided button was only meant for an ornamental finish to the stick. We are informed further that la soye was in reality hairs from the horse or some other animal, of which from 80 to 100 were used for each bow. The up-stroke of the bow was used on the weak beats, 2, 4, 6, 8, and the down-stroke on the strong beats, 1, 3, 5, 7 (p. 185). The same practice prevailed in England in 1667, when Christopher Simpson wrote the Division Viol. He gives information concerning the construction of the bow in these words: “the viol-bow for division should be stiff but not heavy. The length (betwixt the two places where the hairs are fastened at each end) about seven-and-twenty inches. The nut should be short, the height of it about a finger’s breadth or a little more” (p. 2).