VIOLIN BOWS

He who wields the violin bow aright wields the wand of a magician. If ever mortal could call the spirits from the vasty deep, it is the virtuoso who throws into sympathetic vibrations the cords of a Cremona.

The wood of his wand, from the forests of Fernambuc or Pernambuco, choice and seasoned, and delicately graduated and tapering, receives through the varying pressure of his five fingers the waves of his personal magnetism.

The back of his thumb will often touch even the hairs which are in direct contact with the strings, and therefore the psychic and emotional vibrations of the artist’s soul are wedded closely to the physical pulses of sound which throb in the agitated air column of the Cremona, and flow forth in the air waves (like light and heat), filling space with their musical magnetism, and seeking only the medium of kindred spirits and suitable organisms to utter through the vibrating human nerve tissues of others the open secrets of the player’s soul.

No Mesmer, or magician of the East, controls a more subtle force than does the violinist, who, face to face with his audience, lifts his tapering wand and rules therewith the

“_Tides of music’s golden sea setting towards eternity._”

By those who indite exhaustive historical or constructive treatises on the violin--the bow, like the violin, has been treated archæologically--we have been led up to ancient monuments and shown bows (or things supposed to be bows) on vases, sculptured frescoes, missals and other monkish manuscripts. We have been sent out to wild islands and continents, and introduced to the Ravanastron bow of ancient Ceylon; the bow of the Moorish rebab; the ninth, eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth century viol bows of Europe--all more or less primitive, with sometimes gut for hair, or hair loose, hair limp, and with no means of regulating its tension except by the introduction of the fingers to press the hair or tighten it for a moment.

In Paul Veronese’s Marriage at Cana (Versailles) this is well shown. Paul himself was a viol player, and apparently held his bow chiefly by the hair for this same regulative purpose.

C. Simpson (the division “viol”), 1667, gives a somewhat more advanced viol bow, in which the hand splits the difference between wood and hair and rests on both (Fig. iii). Of course, when held to the chin, this clumsy finger regulation of the hair tension would be less convenient to manage, and hence we come upon the eighteenth century with a strip of notched metal (Fig. iv.) and a movable sliding nut.