What is this thing called a fiddle? : Shelburne Free Press : https://shelburnefreepress.ca

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What is this thing called a fiddle?

With fiddle-fever taking hold across Canada, and especially Dufferin, this time of year, lots of questions arise about the instrument.

Did Nero actually “fiddle” while Rome burned? Figuratively, maybe, but if the question has to do with music, one has to ask what instrument he was using.

Still, this legend has inspired a float or two at Shelburne's Old Time Fiddle parade, which is happening on Saturday, Aug. 9.

According to Wikipedia, the bowed string musical instruments made their way to Europe in the 9th century A.D., a long after Nero was under the ground. The first 4-string bowed instrument, apparently, was the lira which came from the Byzantine Empire and was said to be the equivalent of the rabab of the Islamic Empires.

Okay. But the lira was not the same as a fiddle, or violin. “The Byzantine lira spread through Europe westward and in the 11th and 12th centuries European writers use the terms fiddle and lira interchangeably when referring to bowed instruments (Encyclopedia Britannica. 2009). In the meantime rabab was introduced to the Western Europe possibly through the Iberian Peninsula and both bowed instruments spread widely throughout Europe giving birth to various European bowed instruments,” Wikipedia explains.

Musical highbrows might not like it, but the first term applied to this instrument was “fiddle.” The Oxford dictionary defines “violin” as “a fiddle,” and traces the word only to 1579.

It was a century and a half after that, in 1716, when Antonio Stradivari of Cremona made what came to be known as the Messiah-Salabue Stradivarius – an instrument now in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England.

George Macarthur of Lindsay describes it as something of a model for its sound, as the most famous of all the “Strads,” and the one on which his instruments are patterned. It's not, however, an infringement on the design. The donor of the instrument to the museum intended that it be used as “a yardstick for future violin makers to learn from.”

George Macarthur is a violin and bow maker who's known to fiddlers in Dufferin County through his workshops at the Fiddle camps organized by Bill Elliott of Orangeville.

He is not the only fiddle maker who would be known in Dufferin. One of the championship Schryer triplets builds, and Mr. Macarthur says there are probably 30 or 40 new ones coming out of school programs annually. He, himself, is self taught since recovering a violin from the attic and repairing it about 14 years ago, he says.

So what goes into violins and bows?

“Virtually always, the neck the back and the sides are maple. The top is spruce. Various maples are used, and all have a different sound. The tops are of red spruce or of Adirondack, which is hard to get.” Mr. Macarthur said fiddle makers prefer well aged wood, “cut and dried for more than 10 years.”

If you look closely at a fiddle, you'll see that it has a complex shape. Mr. Macarthur describes the design as “all very mathematical.”

It's a bit hard to discern the thickness of the wood in a fiddle. The top is between 2 and 2.5 mm and the back, says Mr. Macarthur, is between 2 and 4.5 mm, whereas the side are “less than a millimetre.”

Everything about the fiddle, including the thickness of the wood, is a determinant of the sound.

But you don't get any sound at all unless you have rosin on the bow. Mr. Macarthur explains that the rosin on the horsehair strings of the bow creates friction that causes the fiddle strings to vibrate; no vibration, no sound.

He is also a bow maker, one of possibly no more than a dozen, and confirms that the strings of the best bows are of genuine horsehair – preferably imported from Mongolia or China.

Mr. Macarthur imports the hair by the pound, and strings between 160 and 180 strands per bow. He won't use any of the artificial hair that might be on the market but says there are cheaper bows from Asia that do.

Mr. Macarthur wouldn't guess at how much time in terms of hours he would put into making a fiddle, but says his time would likely be over a period of about four months.

He doesn't pretend to be a Stradavari or an Amati but his Messiah-patterned fiddles have won popularity among prominent fiddlers, among them Natalie MacMaster.

So all you have to do to make fiddle music is run the bow over the strings and push the strings down with your fingers?

Not so fast. “The violin is the hardest thing to learn,” he said. “There are no frets. It's very temperamental. All things can have a different sound.”

By Wes Keller

Post date: 2013-08-01 12:06:07
Post date GMT: 2013-08-01 16:06:07
Post modified date: 2013-08-16 00:06:48
Post modified date GMT: 2013-08-16 04:06:48