Stringed Instruments
Stringed Instruments Fast Facts
In all cases the sound is produced when a bow is drawn across a tightly stretched string, thereby setting it in vibration. These vibrations are communicated to the body of the instrument, which is in effect a hollow wooden box. This responds in sympathy, controls and amplifies the vibrations and passes them on as sound waves. The upper end terminates in a slender neck which carries a peg box and a fingerboard, and is finished off in an ornamental scroll. The strings are attached to pegs set laterally in the peg box, and then run down over the fingerboard, across a bridge (which lifts them clear of the body) to a tailpiece. This is held in a floating position by a piece of gut looped round an endpin set in the base of the instrument.
A Brief History of the Stringed Instruments
The string section of the modern orchestra are all members of the Violin Family and consist of the following instruments: violin; viola; cello (short for violoncello); bass (short for double bass or contrabass).
All that can be safely said about the origins of this family is that it emerged during the 16th century and took many of its characteristics from various bowed string instruments of earlier times. These include the rebec (a small three-stringed instrument popular during the Middle Ages, and descended from an 11th century Arab instrument), the fiddle (really a generic name for a number of stringed instruments of different shapes and sizes played by European folk musicians in medieval times), the lire da braccio (a 15th century refinement of the common fiddle), and the viola da gamba (the viol; played in a vertical position held upright on the knee – hence do gamba, as opposed to da braccio, that is ‘on the arm’). Any attempt to trace a clear line of descent from all or any of these instruments is bedeviled by the fact that the word ‘violin’ was applied, in the early days, to a variety of different instruments in a very haphazard way, and it was not until the end of the 16th century that any kind of agreement began to appear.
The members of the stringed family are bowed instruments,
each with four strings tuned a fifth apart (except the double bass, which
is tuned in fourths). The soprano and alto members, the violin and viola,
are held against the shoulder, with the player’s chin resting on the edge
of the instrument. The bass members (cello and double bass) are so large
that they have to rest on the floor: the cello held between the player’s
widespread legs as he sits on a chair and the bass in front of the player
as he sits on a stool, or stands.
The basic principle of all stringed instruments is that a length
of gut, wire, silk or nylon held in tension between two points is made
to vibrate, and it is the vibration of the string – whether plucked, struck
or bowed - which emits the sound or note. However, the sound is hardly
audible unless a soundboard or box is provided to amplify it, and it is
the transmission of the vibrations of the strings to the soundboard which
gives the different stringed instruments their many varied timbres.
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