Tutti Stringi

The Fiddle Bow

A problem for many instruments is how to sustain a sound. A stroke, a pluck, and the sound dies away. To some extent the sound can be extended by a resonator, and today by electronics, but all the same, eventually the sound attenuates and dies away, unlike that of voices and wind instruments. Drums and plucked and hammered strings really suffer. Drum rolls help, but they are really only repeated strokes. Rapid repetitive plucking again are really only repeated plucks. And repeated piano notes are yet again really only repeated hammer strokes.

But all music students hear again and again from their teachers ‘Make it sing’.

Drummers and keyboard players do their best, with varying success (and various improbable devices).

Plucked string players, at least, achieved limited success some time around 600-700 CE and somewhere in Central Asia, probably somewhere between the Aral and Caspian Seas. Werner Bachmann suggested (The Origins of Bowing) that the first attempts to produce a sustained sound on a stringed instrument was with a roughened or rosined stick, scraping it to and fro against the string. It seemed not to be long before attaching strings to the stick proved more successful, substituting friction for scraping. Since much of that area was dominated by horse-riding cultures, it cannot have been long before the ‘strings’ (better called the hairs) were those from a horse’s tail. By 800 CE we have references to bowed instruments in Persia and beyond.

Some of the simplest bows, still seen for example in South-East Africa, are just curved sticks, sometimes little more than twigs, with sisal threads tied to each end. The earliest representations of fiddle bows in European iconography are large, semicircular wooden bows again with string attached to each end, seen in 10th and 11th century Mozarabic manuscripts from Christian areas of Spain. And while most musical bows are sounded by tapping the string with a stick, some bows are bowed with a second bow, but whether that ever happened in prehistoric times or whether it was an adoption from European fiddling we do not know.

Those semicircular bows were large and clumsy (so were the fiddles), and a straighter stick with strings seems always to have been more successful and more popular around the world, with the nearest to Europe seen in Byzantine manuscripts of the tenth and eleventh centuries.

The problem is how to keep the hairs away from the stick. Widespread across Asia is the use of the fingers between the hair and the stick to achieve this. This has the advantage of being able to control the hair tension – by tightening the tension the hairs can rub just one string, by slackening it, the hairs can rub two or more, thus producing a drone at the same time as a melody.

In Europe and elsewhere we seem to prefer a permanent fitting between hairs and stick. This could originally have been a forked stick, the stub of the fork serving as an attachment point for the hand-end of the stick – one sixteenth-century bow from the wreck of Henry VIII’s warship Mary Rose seems to have had something like that form (see a separate article on this site for that).

We have very few surviving early bows, and what we see with them is what is called a clip-in frog. Why is this wooden block between the hairs and handle-end of the stick called a frog? Nobody seems to know, though other terms such as the heel for that end of the stick are also used. The clip-in frog is fine so long as the hairs do not stretch in use, but the only way to control any stretching of the hairs is to pull the frog a bit closer to the end of the stick and hope it will stay put. The frog also helped to curve stick slightly so as to keep the hairs a little further from the point of the bow.

A better device was the crémaillère, a ridge of notches set into the upper edge of the stick, with a bridle from the frog. This served as a ratchet – pulling the bridle into the next notch tightened the hairs without any risk of the frog slipping back. Rather later, in the mid-seventeenth century, the point of the bow began to be carved slightly, again keeping the hair further away from the point. A problem there, though, was that any thickening of the point added weight and at the same time was putting strain on the grain of the wood, risking the lower part of the point splitting away.

In the eighteenth-century Classical period somebody (there seems to be no record of who it was) had the idea of fitting a screw mechanism into the heel of the stick, with a threaded lug inset into the top of the frog and a threaded rod passing through the end of the handle. Also various devices were produced to help keep the band of hairs flattened, and also to widen the band of hairs so as to strengthen the bow stroke.

At the same time, bow makers (Cramer is always said to have been one of the first) were gradually extending the point of the stick so that the whole length of the hair could be used, though the sticks, still of snakewood and other tropical woods, were still slightly curved outwards. Various shapes of bow tip were produced under various names, each by different makers and their copyists.

Coincidentally, it was also found that wood from Brazil, which had long provided a red dye for cloth manufacturing, was of much tougher grain, with less risk of splitting, and ideal for bows. And it was also found that an inward camber of the bow stick gave much greater control and stiffness, and also that this wood, called pernambuco, would retain this camber, once it had been heated and bent to shape. Nicolas Tourte was the first to introduce this pattern, which was perfected by his son, François, though there has always been some discussion whether he or Edward Dodd was the first to introduce the inward camber.

Today a new problem has arisen and that is that pernambuco is now an endangered species. Too much has been cut down, with no planned replanting, and as a result the use of pernambuco is likely to be banned. Whether, unlike ivory, its import or export will be prohibited seems improbable, for if it were, no orchestra, no player of any of the violin family, would ever be able to travel, for today every such player uses bows of pernambuco. But the export of new logs is likely to be prohibited, leading to a rush to find new materials for new bows. Carbon fibre has had some success, though how many professionals would adopt it we do not yet know. Certainly no other wood has yet proved popular, though early-music players have so far been able to go back to historic woods.

Musicians may be happy enough to abandon their plastic water bottles and coffee cups etc, but they are facing much greater problems for the materials of their instruments, not just their bows, but also the woods that until now have been used for clarinets and oboes, and also marimbas and xylophones. All those woods, including most of the Dalbergias, are now endangered species.

© Jeremy Montagu, 2019