The Story of the Bow

The word bow has several meanings and two distinct pronunciations, but they all derive from a single source: the Old English word bugan, which refers both to things that are bent or curved and the act of bending them. By the time Old English morphed into Middle English, the word boue had emerged, referring both to the shape of an arch and to the bow used in archery, and by the late sixteenth century bow in its modern spelling was being used to refer to the wooden stick with horsehair that was used to play various string instruments. But the bow had been in use for centuries before it acquired that name.

The earliest drums have been found on the site of ancient Mesopotamia (now Iraq), dating from about 6,000 BC: animal skins stretched over a frame made of bone, wood or a gourd. It's probably not a coincidence that the earliest string instruments were also found in Mesopotamia since it makes sense that the first people who came up with the idea of using animal skin stretched over a resonating chamber that you strike with your hand or a special kind of stick would then come up with the idea of stretching animal intestines or metal wires over a resonating chamber and producing sounds with them. The earliest string instruments were lyres (despite their name they were actually quite honest), basically small harps that you plucked with your fingers. The earliest examples of these that have been found date from about 2700 BC. Eventually someone invented the first pick or plectrum with which to pluck the strings, creating new techniques and colors, and eventually something truly miraculous happened. 

We don't know exactly when bows started being used, but I have a theory. You've probably all encountered toddlers who decided that everything is a drum and that anything can be used as a stick with which to beat that drum. I imagine that there was an ancient Mesopotamian archer who also played the lyre. One day he came home from battle, locked up his arrows but accidentally left his bow lying around and while he left the room for a second his two-year-old son took his bow and started playing the lyre with it and then the archer said "what is that beautiful sound?" and started designing bowed string instruments. There is no evidence to support my theory except for the fact that it cannot be a coincidence that the bow used in archery and the bow used in music have shared a name and many details of their construction for centuries. The video below illustrates this quite well.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves; there were many intermediate steps between that Mesopotamian toddler and the violin. The earliest bowed string instrument we know about and can accurately analyze is the rebab. It's an Arabic word and its origin was probably also in the geographical neighborhood of Mesopotamia, most likely the neighboring empire of Persia, sometime around the eighth century BC. The rebab is still played to this day and exists in several different forms. In this video below we see it in something close to its original form with just a single string; notice that the bow here does indeed look a bit like an archery bow and that it's played underhand.

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The rebab then took an amazing journey. It acquired more strings, underwent several design transformations, and when around the second century BC merchants started to traverse the pan-Eurasian network of trade routes that became known as the Silk Road, the rebab went with them, and continued to take that journey throughout the entirety of its existence of over a millennium and a half. This is why so many countries along that route and beyond into Europe, Asia and north Africa developed their own version of the rebab: in Indonesia it became a standard instrument of the Javanese gamelan; the Chinese slimmed it down, adjusted it to their own modalities and called it an erhu; the Serbians played the bow overhand, adjusted its playing technique and called it a gusle; and here in the illustration shown on the right from the Cantigas de Santa Maria, we see that in thirteenth century Spain they fashioned it into a kind of teardrop shape that would soon lead to the next great innovation in string playing: holding the instrument against the shoulder instead of upright.

The rebab gave way to two other string instruments that could be played in either position: the rebec and the vielle. The rebec was carved from a single piece of wood and retained that teardrop shape while the vielle had a larger, more boxy shape and a deeper tone. There was no standardized way of holding them, and as players developed preferences and techniques specific to a certain method it led to a pivotal moment in the development of bowed string instruments.

A schism developed between da braccio, meaning “of the arm”, the instruments that were played with the bottom of the instrument placed against the chest, shoulder or, eventually, under the chin; and da gamba, meaning “of the leg”, that was played upright, the instrument resting on or between the players’ legs. They both had advantages and disadvantages: playing it upright meant you could play the bow either underhand or overhand, which creates two different kinds of colors and articulation, whereas playing it “da braccio” is only possible overhand; playing it “da gamba” was also better at accommodating larger sizes that could play in lower registers. However, the “da braccio” technique allows the player to stand up and move around, making it good for accompanying dancing and is very convenient when there’s no place to sit, and also made it possible to develop a bow technique that allowed for faster, more agile and virtuosic playing.

At this point many different kinds of bowed string instruments were being developed simultaneously, and the center of gravity for this work was starting to shift from Spain to Italy. The first bowed instruments to cohere into a standardized form and family of different sizes was the viol. (That is its proper name, though it later became common to use the term viola da gamba to avoid confusion with the violin family.) Unlike the other instruments I’ve discussed so far, the viol is not only descended from the rebab, but is also indebted in its design to plucked instruments like the lute and vihuela, the direct predecessor to the guitar. As a result, viols have frets on its fingerboard, and its six strings are tuned to make it possible to form chords. Viols come in a variety of sizes, and even the smallest ones are played upright. All members of the viol family use a bow that is played underhand. By this time the stick of the bow had lost its resemblance to the archery bow, but it still retained enough of its curved nature that it could play multiple strings at once.

As harmonic language developed and string instruments were increasingly used in ensembles with wind instruments and singers, the ability to create sustained chords and drones to accompany singers and other instruments became an increasingly desired trait. When played well on a well-designed instrument the effect of this was hauntingly beautiful, but it was difficult to create an instrument that was equally effective at playing both complete chords on three or more strings and individual notes on one string. But the best minds of Europe went to work, and by the 15th century the craft of instrument building had developed enough to create an instrument designed to be the best of all worlds: the lira da braccio. This seven-stringed instrument was so complex in its design that it attracted the attention of Leonardo da Vinci. It also inspired the development of a da gamba counterpart, the lirone, the first bowed string instrument that could only play chords and not individual notes.

(While we’re getting slightly off track chronologically, I want to mention here another bowed instrument that can only play chords, the Hungarian folk instrument known as the Kontra. Played with a very heavy bow, this instrument is the engine that drives the intense energy of Hungarian dance, and it’s somewhat astonishing that such a powerful sound comes from such a small body.)

The lira da braccio, as it turns out, was a bit too complex for its own good; as instrumental ensembles became more common it became less necessary for string instruments to be a one-man band, and more desirable to maximize its resonance and ability to play highly ornamented melodies. But all the engineering that went into the lira was not in vain, because it led the way for its next incarnation: the violin. While the violin still has a ways to go to match the longevity of the rebab and its earliest direct variants, at 500 years and counting its run is already quite respectable. To be sure, the violin (along with its sister instruments the viola and the cello – the double bass is actually the last remaining member of the gamba family still in common use) has gone through some changes in that time, but it’s remarkable how little changed it actually is. In terms of playing the instrument, the most significant change is not in the violin itself, but the bow.

The original violin bow still had remnants of the curve of the archery bow, so that the natural sound it made was in the form of a swell or a wave; it sounds a bit like the sound was already going before the instrument joined it mid-stream. It’s a wonderfully expressive effect, though in the hands of someone new to the early bow it can start to sound a bit seasick. The weight and balance of the bow gradually shifted over the course of the Baroque and early Classical period, ever diminishing that swelling effect, and it disappeared altogether in the late 18th century due to the efforts of the French bow maker François-Xavier Tourte, who revolutionized the bow by concentrating its weight directly underneath the player’s fingers, with the result that it could now make clean attacks and more easily coordinate with its fellow players in the orchestra. The Tourte bow also provided a more powerful and consistent tone.

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Tourte also standardized the materials used to make the bow, using only unvarnished Pernambuco wood imported from Brazil for the stick, with a spreader block to ensure even distribution of the horsehair that actually comes in contact with the string, after being coated in tree rosin to create friction with the string and produce a strong sound.

These materials have remained largely consistent for over two centuries. But that’s in the process of changing. Pernambuco is now considered an endangered species, and despite aggressive replanting efforts, the effects of excessive harvesting, climate change, and the industrial deforestation of the Amazon have created increasingly inhospitable conditions for Pernambuco trees, and we’re likely to see a complete ban on its trade within the next year or two.

The stick will likely be replaced by carbon fiber, which is also being found to be an effective replacement for the wood in the instrument itself. Meanwhile there is also an increased demand for a synthetic alternative to horsehair, as well as alternatives to rosin for those who are allergic to it. Soon playing a string instrument will involve no organic materials at all.

But this is a welcome development for one aspect of string playing. Occasionally composers will call for players to strike their strings with the wood of the bow for a percussive effect called col legno (with the wood). (You can hear this effect about 30 seconds into Rossini’s overture to Il Signor Bruschino). Players hate doing this because it can damage the wood, but it won’t damage carbon fiber!

This change will end the last material link between violin bows and ancient archery bows. It’s been quite a journey since that Mesopotamian toddler’s discovery.