Violin

The violin is a bowed stringed instrument and the smallest, highest-pitched member of the violin family, which also includes the viola, cello and double bass. It typically carries four strings tuned in perfect fifths to G, D, A and E. Sound is drawn from it either by drawing a bow across the strings or by plucking them with the fingers.

The violin's body is a hollow, hourglass-shaped wooden shell whose arched top, or soundboard, is usually of spruce, while the back is often of maple; two f-shaped sound holes pierce the top. A slender neck ends in a scroll, and the fretless fingerboard of hardwood is the surface on which the player stops the strings to change pitch.

Inside the body, the soundpost is a small friction-fit spruce cylinder that transmits high-frequency vibrations from the bridge and soundboard to the back of the instrument, producing its characteristic sound. Under the belly on the bass foot side of the bridge lies the bass bar, which extends beyond the f-holes and thus transmits the motion of the bass foot of the bridge over a large area of the belly.

A vibrating string can produce a motion rich in harmonics, and bowing the string supplies energy continuously and so maintains that harmonic richness. The interaction between bow and string is a stick-slip mechanism: the sticky rosin on the bow hair drags the string along until the restoring force due to string tension exceeds the static friction, at which point the string slips back toward equilibrium. As the cycle repeats, the string maintains a triangular shape whose apex races around an envelope shaped like half a sine function, making one round trip at the fundamental frequency of the string, so that a string playing an A at 440 Hz is driven 440 times per second. A vibration of 440 cycles per second, or 440 Hz, is heard as the note A in the treble clef, the pitch of the violin's A string.

For a given bowing speed and bowing position there is only a certain range of bow force that will maintain Helmholtz motion; the required force is a little higher as one bows closer to the bridge, and with more applied force more higher harmonics are excited, so the tone is brighter and richer. Because the bow acts on the surface of the string rather than at its centre, it also exerts a twisting or torsional force that excites additional torsional waves travelling up and down the string, though these waves exert only a small torque on the bridge and so produce little sound by themselves. During a pitch vibrato the harmonics of a note move from strong transmission at a resonance to weak transmission or vice versa, so the spectrum of the output note varies strongly, which makes the sound much more interesting and is one of the two most important features that help identify the sound of a violin.

The modern four-string violin is generally considered to have originated about 1550 in northern Italy. By 1600 Cremona was the undisputed center of violin making in Europe. The instrument was assimilated into the art music of the Middle East and South India and, as the fiddle, is played in the folk music of many countries.

Rich-toned, expressive and versatile, violins were both virtuoso solo instruments and the core of the new orchestras. A century of violin making in Cremona culminated in the instruments from the workshop of Antonio Stradivari; from his extraordinary seventy-year career as a luthier 650 instruments survive, a testament to his productivity and longevity and to the high value placed on his instruments. Stradivari's reputation rests on the unparalleled quality of the workmanship and design of his instruments as much as on the legendary varnish, made according to a long-lost secret recipe.

During Nicolò Amati's working life the Amati workshop was one of the finest violin ateliers in Europe, training many apprentices who became important instrument builders, possibly including the young Antonio Stradivari. Stradivari was once thought to have been a pupil of Nicolò Amati, but is now believed to have been apprenticed as a wood-carver in Cremona and to have turned to violin-making through acquaintance with the Amati household; his early violins from 1660 to 1684 follow Amati models.

The long-pattern violin is approximately one centimeter longer than the conventional violin, with a relatively flat arching, and represents a departure from the classic Amati model of Cremonese instruments.

Antonio Stradivari of Cremona is widely regarded as the greatest violin maker of all time. His finest examples were made between about 1699 and about 1720. The Museo del Violino collection represents him through the Clisbee violin of 1669 and the violoncello Stauffer ex Cristiani of 1700, alongside the Il Cremonese violin of 1715 and the Vesuvius violin of 1727. The Harrison Stradivari belongs to the maker's Long Pattern instruments, made in the 1690s.

The Harrison Stradivari measures 598 mm in total length, with a back length of 363 mm and a vibrating string length of 330 mm. The 1721 Lady Blunt, one of the best-preserved Stradivari violins in existence, was sold in June 2011 in a Tarisio online auction for £9.8m (£8,750,000 hammer), equivalent to $15.9m. The buyer was an anonymous bidder who won a 90-minute bidding battle with one other bidder, and all the proceeds from the sale went to the Nippon Foundation's Northeastern Japan Earthquake and Tsunami Relief Fund. The Harrison is exceptionally well preserved, with its original neck and top block.

The violin owes its condition to the fact that it has always been a collector's piece: it was probably initially purchased by the collector Cozio di Salabue from one of Stradivari's sons, and in the 1820s Salabue sold it to Luigi Tarisio, a dealer and collector from Piedmont, which earned it the name by which it is now known. The Messiah is not entirely untouched: the neck was lengthened and the pegs, bridge and tailpiece were added in the 19th century, but the varnish is almost unworn and the carving is as crisp as the day it was made. In 1855 the Messiah was bought by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, a maker and dealer in violins, who kept it in a glass case.

The Museo del Violino describes the complementarity of skills and the integrated management of its laboratories as creating a research centre of excellence in diagnostics and acoustics that is a strength for the museum and the city of Cremona. Past and current efforts to safeguard the craftsmanship enjoy the participation and support of diverse stakeholders including the municipality and national government, local institutions and violin-makers' workshops and associations.

During his lifetime in Cremona, Stradivari created violins of several patterns that have been much imitated and are still the preferred instruments of many players.

The National Music Museum of Vermillion, South Dakota, owns one of only two existing mandolins and one of five existing guitars by Antonio Stradivari. These, together with a violin by Nicolò Amati also owned by the museum, journeyed to Italy for the year-long exhibition Reunion in Cremona at the Museo del Violino.

The National Music Museum's Amati violin carries the date 1574 and is credited to Andrea Amati, with the making also attributed to his son Antonio; it was built in Cremona, Italy. The small-pattern violin was produced near the end of Andrea Amati's life, probably with a significant amount of handwork by his son Antonio, and it is one of the best-preserved violins of the period, with no evidence of regraduation of the interior. The violin was once part of the collection of William Corbett, the London composer and violin collector, and it passed through the workshop of John Betts in the early nineteenth century, which probably left it in much the state it is in today.

The modern bow is the work of François Xavier Tourte, called le Jeune, whose golden period after 1800 produced the definitive model that has been emulated ever since. Although little is known about his life, his bowmaking practice continued unabated through uprisings and social shifts of every kind, and examples of his work exist for every half-decade between 1770 and 1830 across six decades.

The innovations that define the modern bow originated primarily with the Tourte brothers and their father Nicolas Pierre Tourte, though François Xavier Tourte is considered the true author of the form. His stick has a screw mechanism that cannot be changed while playing and is made in a compound curve to which considerable tension can be applied, making it possible to apply much pressure to the strings.

In the 19th century, with the advent of large auditoriums and the violin virtuoso, the violin underwent its last changes in design: the bridge was heightened, the sound post and bass bar were thickened, the body became flatter and the neck was angled back, giving a stronger, more brilliant tone in place of the delicate, intimate tone of the 18th-century violin.

While the body of a Baroque violin is essentially the same as a modern instrument, the Baroque neck is shorter and thicker and projects straight out of the body rather than bending back, and the fingerboard has gradually lengthened as the instrument's range has grown higher.

The tenor violin, known from the 16th century through the 18th century, was midway in size between the viola and cello and was tuned F, c, g and d'.

Traditional violin craftsmanship in Cremona was inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2012, the committee having decided that the nomination satisfied the inscription criteria because that craftsmanship has been transmitted from generation to generation, both through apprenticeship and through formal education, playing an important role in the everyday life of people in Cremona and giving them a sense of identity. UNESCO recognized that the high degree of skills and manual inventiveness of traditional violin craftsmanship could testify to human creativity while contributing to intercultural dialogue and to the visibility of intangible cultural heritage as a whole. Cremonese violin-makers consider the sharing of knowledge fundamental to the growth of their craftsmanship, and dialogue with musicians is deemed essential to understanding their needs.

• about 1550
  Origin in northern Italy
  The violin emerges in northern Italy.
• 1574
  Amati small-pattern violin
  The small-pattern violin associated with Amati.
• 1600
  Cremona the undisputed centre
  Cremona stands as the undisputed centre of violin making.
• around 1630
  Plague and famine
  Plague and famine leave Nicolò Amati the sole survivor.
• 1626
  Les 24 violons du roi
  The French royal ensemble of the twenty-four violins.
• 1660–1684
  Stradivari's early Amati-model violins
  Stradivari's early violins follow Amati models. ^{8Violin | Stradivari, Antonio (maker), Cremona 1699 · Victoria and Albert Museum, London ↗}
• 1690s
  Harrison Long Pattern
  The Harrison Long Pattern.
• about 1699 to about 1720
  Stradivari's golden period
  Stradivari's golden period.
• 1716
  The Messiah
  The Messiah violin by Antonio Stradivari, of maple and spruce, with a length of 59.3 cm. ^{12MESSIAH VIOLIN, BY STRADIVARI · Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford ↗}
• 1721
  Lady Blunt
  The Lady Blunt violin.
• 1747 or 1748
  Tourte's birth
  Birth of Tourte.
• 1774–1775
  Tourte begins bowmaking
  Tourte begins making bows. ^{17François Xavier Tourte ‘le Jeune’ · Tarisio Cozio Archive ↗}
• 1800
  First evidence of the independent Tourte workshop
  The first definitive evidence of an independent Tourte workshop on the Quai de l'Ecole. ^{17François Xavier Tourte ‘le Jeune’ · Tarisio Cozio Archive ↗}
• 1835
  Tourte's death
  Death of Tourte.
• 1939
  Messiah presented to the Ashmolean
  The Messiah is presented to the Ashmolean by Alfred and Arthur Hill. ^{12MESSIAH VIOLIN, BY STRADIVARI · Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford ↗}