Violin Day

What the day is

Violin Day is observed on December 13. The violin has changed less across four hundred years than almost any instrument still in regular use.

Origin and background

It took its recognizable form in northern Italy during the sixteenth century, with the workshops of Cremona doing most of the defining. The line runs from Andrea Amati through his descendants to Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri, all working in the same small city across roughly two hundred years. Instruments made there in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries still set the reference standard.

The construction is more demanding than it looks. A violin is around seventy separate pieces of wood held together without a single nail, assembled with hide glue chosen precisely because it can be softened and taken apart again for repair centuries later. The arched top and back are carved rather than bent. Inside, a bass bar runs beneath the low strings and a small dowel called the sound post stands under the bridge, carrying vibration to the back. The French call that post the soul of the instrument, and moving it by a millimeter audibly changes the sound.

The mystique around old Italian instruments has been tested directly, with results that unsettled a great many people. In blind trials, accomplished soloists played old Italian violins against high-quality modern ones without knowing which was which. They could not reliably tell them apart, and on average they preferred the new instruments. The tests have been criticized over their conditions, but they have been repeated and the basic finding has held.

The bow is very nearly a separate instrument and reached its modern form in the late eighteenth century, which changed what players could do at least as much as anything about the violin itself.

How to take part

• Listen to solo repertoire rather than orchestral, where the instrument is easier to hear as itself.
• Start if you have always meant to. Adult beginners do fine and rental instruments cost little.
• Visit a workshop if there is one near you. The making is remarkable to watch.
• Hear a living maker's instrument beside an old one, given what the blind tests found.
• Have any instrument sitting unplayed in a cupboard checked over, particularly the bridge and sound post.