From Cremona to Chennai: The Story of the Violin
Cremona, northern Italy, in the middle of the 1500s. In a workshop in this small city on the river Po, Andrea Amati was shaping maple and spruce into a new kind of bowed instrument: four strings, a gently arched body with elegant curves, f-shaped sound holes and a carved scroll at the head. Some of the oldest violins that survive today are attributed to him, including instruments made for the French royal court in the 1560s.
Amati did not invent the violin alone, and nobody can name the exact moment it was born. But the design that emerged in northern Italy in his lifetime was so successful that, apart from some later adjustments, it has barely changed in more than four hundred years. From that Cremona workshop the violin went on to lead orchestras, set village dances alight and find a home as far away as the concert halls of South India.
Before the violin
Bowed string instruments reached Europe in the Middle Ages, probably from the Byzantine and Islamic worlds. Medieval players used the pear-shaped rebec and the larger vielle, and Renaissance Italy had the lira da braccio, held on the arm much like a violin. Historians debate exactly how these instruments fed into the violin, but by the early sixteenth century, in northern Italian cities such as Cremona and Brescia, makers were producing the first true members of the violin family, along with its larger relatives, the viola and the cello.
Cremona's golden age
Andrea Amati founded a dynasty. His sons Antonio and Girolamo continued the workshop, and his grandson Nicolò Amati became one of the finest makers of the seventeenth century. Tradition holds that the young Antonio Stradivari learned his craft in Nicolò's workshop, although historians note that the evidence for this is not conclusive.
Stradivari, who lived from about 1644 to 1737, worked in Cremona for some seven decades. Over that long career he refined the shape and arching of the violin, and the instruments from roughly the first two decades of the eighteenth century are often described as his golden period. Several hundred of his instruments survive, and they are among the most valuable musical instruments in the world.
A few streets away worked the Guarneri family, whose most celebrated member, Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù (1698–1744), made bolder, more irregular-looking violins with a powerful voice. Many leading soloists have preferred his instruments. Scientists and makers have spent generations studying Cremonese wood, varnish and design, and there is still no single agreed explanation for why the best of these instruments sound the way they do.
The violin takes centre stage
At first the violin was often considered an instrument for dance music, played by professional musicians at courts and festivities. That changed quickly in the seventeenth century. Claudio Monteverdi included violins in his opera L'Orfeo (1607), and the French court maintained a celebrated string band known as the Twenty-Four Violins of the King.
In the late baroque period Italy produced a line of great violinist-composers. Arcangelo Corelli in Rome wrote sonatas and concertos that were studied across Europe, and Antonio Vivaldi in Venice wrote hundreds of concertos, including The Four Seasons, published in the 1720s. In Germany, Johann Sebastian Bach composed his sonatas and partitas for solo violin, still a summit of the repertoire.
In the classical era of Haydn and Mozart, violins formed the core of the orchestra and two of the four voices in the newly fashionable string quartet. To meet the demands of larger halls and more powerful music, makers in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries modified many older instruments, giving them longer, more angled necks, higher bridges and stronger internal bass bars. Around the same time the French bow maker François Tourte perfected the modern bow, with its inward-curving stick. Virtuosos such as Niccolò Paganini, who famously played a Guarneri del Gesù, dazzled audiences and expanded what the instrument was thought capable of.
The fiddle: one instrument, many traditions
While the violin conquered concert halls, the same instrument, often called the fiddle, spread through folk music almost everywhere it travelled. It became the heart of Irish and Scottish dance music, Scandinavian folk music, Romani and klezmer traditions, and the old-time and bluegrass music of the American South. In Norway, players developed the Hardanger fiddle, with extra sympathetic strings that ring beneath the main ones. Fiddlers typically learned by ear, passing tunes down through families and communities, and each tradition developed its own bowing patterns and ornaments.
The violin in Indian classical music
One of the violin's most remarkable journeys was to India. The instrument arrived with Europeans, and in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries musicians in South India began adapting it to Carnatic classical music. Tradition credits Baluswami Dikshitar, brother of the great composer Muthuswami Dikshitar, as one of the first to take it up.
Indian violinists made the instrument their own. In Carnatic music it is usually played seated on the floor, with the scroll resting against the player's foot and the body against the chest, which frees the left hand to slide between notes and produce the gamakas, or ornaments, at the heart of the style. The strings are tuned to suit Indian music rather than to the Western G, D, A, E. The violin became the standard accompanying instrument for Carnatic vocal concerts, and artists such as Lalgudi Jayaraman and M. S. Gopalakrishnan became celebrated soloists, while N. Rajam brought the violin into Hindustani classical music.
The violin today
Today the violin is everywhere: in symphony orchestras and string quartets, Celtic sessions and bluegrass festivals, film scores, pop arrangements and, in solid-body electric form, on rock stages. Its design would still be familiar to Andrea Amati, a testament to how much those early Cremonese makers got right.
If you would like to hear its voice for yourself, you can play a virtual violin free in your browser on HarmonyHub, from a standard or Stradivarius-style violin to the fiddle and Hardanger fiddle, and discover more of India's own instruments on the Indian instruments page. From a sixteenth-century workshop in Cremona, the violin's song has travelled around the world.