The main parts of the violin are the front, also called the belly, top, or soundboard, usually made of well-seasoned spruce; the back, usually made of well-seasoned maple; and the ribs, neck, fingerboard, pegbox, scroll, bridge, tailpiece, and f-holes, or soundholes. The front, back, and ribs are joined together to form a hollow sound box.
The sound box contains the sound post, which is a thin dowel-like stick of wood wedged inside underneath the right side of the bridge and connecting the front and back of the violin. The bass-bar is also important for the transmission of sound, and it is a long strip of wood glued to the inside of the front under the left side of the bridge. These components provide additional support to the construction. The strings are fastened to the tailpiece, rest on the bridge, and are suspended over the fingerboard. They run to the pegbox, where they are attached to tuning pegs that can be turned to change the pitch of the string. The player makes different pitches by placing their left-hand fingers on the string and pressing against the fingerboard. The strings are set in vibration and produce sound when the player draws the bow across them at a right angle near the bridge. Among the prized characteristics of the violin are its singing tone and its potential to play rapid, brilliant figurations as well as lyrical melodies.
Violinists can create special effects using techniques such as pizzicato (plucking the strings), tremolo (moving the bow rapidly back and forth on a string), sul ponticello (playing with the bow extremely close to the bridge to produce a thin, glassy sound), col legno (playing with the wooden part of the bow instead of with the hair), harmonics (placing the fingers of the left hand lightly on certain points of the string to obtain a light, flute-like sound), and glissando (steadily gliding the left-hand fingers up and down along the string to produce an upward- or downward-sliding pitch).
The violin emerged in Italy in the early 1500s and evolved from two medieval bowed instruments: the fiddle (also called viele or fiedel) and the rebec, as well as from the Renaissance lira da braccio (a violin-like instrument with off-the-fingerboard drone strings). The viol, a fretted, six-string instrument that appeared in Europe before the violin and existed side by side with it for about 200 years, is related but not a direct ancestor. The earliest important violin makers were the northern Italians Gasparo da Sal (1540-1609) and Giovanni Maggini (1579-c.).
The craft of violin making reached unprecedented artistic heights in the 17th and early 18th centuries in the workshops of Italians Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri, both from Cremona, and the Austrian Jacob Stainer. Compared with the modern instrument, the early violin had a shorter, thicker neck that was less angled back from the violin’s front, a shorter fingerboard, a flatter bridge, and strings made solely of gut. Early bows were somewhat different in design from modern ones. These construction details were all modified in the 18th and 19th centuries to give the violin a louder, more robust, more brilliant tone.
A number of 20th-century players have restored their 18th-century instruments to the original specifications, believing them to be more suited for early music. Initially used to accompany dancing or to double voice parts in vocal music, the violin was considered an instrument of low social status. However, in the early 1600s, the violin gained prestige through its use in operas such as Orfeo (1607) by the Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi and through the French king Louis XIII’s band of musicians, the 24 violons du roi (the king’s 24 violins,” formed in 1626). This growth in stature continued throughout the Baroque period (circa 1600-c. 1750) in the works of many notable composer-performers, including Arcangelo Corelli, Antonio Vivaldi, and Giuseppe Tartini in Italy and Heinrich Biber, Georg Philipp Telemann, and Johann Sebastian Bach in Germany. The violin became the principal force in the instrumental genres then current: the solo concerto, concerto grosso, sonata, trio sonata, and suite, as well as in opera.
By the mid-18th century, the violin was one of the most popular solo instruments in European music. Violins also formed the leading section of the orchestra, which was the most important instrumental ensemble to emerge in both the Baroque and Classical eras (circa 1750-c. 1820). In the modern orchestra, the violin family remains the most important instrumental ensemble in Western music.
