Without the bow, the violin would be, for all practical purposes, mute. Therefore, an understanding of the origin of the bow is equally as important as an understanding of the origin of the violin.
The bow as a musical instrument, was well-known among primitive cultures around the world, and throughout Islam and the Byzantine Empire, but not introduced to Europe until around the 11th century.
Bows from this early period were quite rudimentary, subject to considerable variation. The curvature of the stick was also convex, much like a drawn archery bow, and the hair fastened directly to the stick without a device for adjusting the tension of the hair.
Through the middle ages and following centuries, the development of the bow remained rather stagnant. Certain developments, such as rudimentary devices to spread the hair, can be seen in paintings from the fourteenth century, but it is not until the mid - and late - seventeenth century, well after the birth of the violin, that improvements such as frogs with dentated mechanisms (called crémaillère mechanisms) to adjust hair tension, and true button and screw mechanisms were developed.
The familiar pike-type Baroque bow head appeared in the mid-1700's, around the time of the death of Stradivari. Common woods used for making bows during this era were iron and snakewood; lighter woods were often fluted to give the bow additional strength and rigidity.
Up until the late eighteenth century, the curvature, or camber of the bow, remained convex. In the 1780's, the Italian violinist and composer Viotti came to Paris, where he became friends with the Tourte family.
Perhaps as a result of experimentation and artistic collaboration, the camber was changed from convex to concave, the fluted bow and pike's head abandoned, and the ferrule invented.
During this period, the evolution of the bow accelerated in response to important changes in performance practice, as music moved from the court and salon to larger venues and larger audiences. The new bow enabled greater sonority, power, and projection, sustained a wider range of dynamic levels, and articulated a greater variety ofnew bowing techniques.
The adoption of pernambuco as the wood of choice for string instrument bows is said to have been, in part, a consequence of expanding international trade. Ships plying South America trade routes would use pernambuco, which is extremely heavy and dense, as ballast on the return leg of their voyages (ships from North America used maple for similar purposes). Pernambuco also was an important source in dye manufacturing before the advent of synthetic aniline dyes. The ready availability of tremendous quantities of pernambuco wood eventually attracted the attention of François Xavier Tourte (b.1747 - d.1835), "the Stradivari of the bow".
With the work of the greatest member of the Tourte family, the bow was perfected. It was François Xavier Tourte who settled on pernambuco as having the ideal combination of strength and elasticity for making bows, and it was he who mathematically established the proper proportions of the bow, measurements which are still in use today.
Fuente:
http://www.knilling.com/
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