History of the Bow

Specialist literature generally treats the early history of the bow only briefly and sometimes contradictorily. There are many reasons for this. Original examples, for instance, could have survived to the present only under exceptional physical conditions. Iconographic depictions and written accounts are therefore the only sources available, at least for the earliest period. Religious restrictions—the Old Testament prohibited depictions of people or objects—further complicate matters. Yet drawing conclusions from images about bows’ stage of development, craftsmanship, or even playing characteristics is extremely difficult. Some depicted bows look crude; others seem well balanced and elegant. The artist’s skill and knowledge of detail must be taken into account when assessing their accuracy. For example, it is scarcely possible to compare directly the precision of this miniature from 1109

Buchner sees evidence of the musical bow’s presence in southern Africa in a rock painting in Cape Town, South Africa.

A San man holds a bow in his right hand whose curvature differs from that of the other seven bows shown. A quiver of arrows lies at his feet. The figure could indeed be engaged in a musical activity. But can this be established as conclusively as Buchner suggests? Does he go too far when he writes, “A Bushman holds the bow in his right hand and touches the strings of seven other bows with it,” and concludes that this represents a more advanced stage “in which seven bows form a single instrument, while the bow in the musician’s right hand has already taken on the function of the modern bow”?
Could the scene instead depict a maker of hunting bows, with several finished bows laid out before him, who is tensioning the string of a new one? Why else is there a quiver in the foreground? Here, too, the interpretation of the source as evidence of musical instruments is not conclusive.
There is no evidence of bowed instruments in the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Judea, Greece, or Etruscan Italy. Idiophones, aerophones, and chordophones were used, but the strings of the latter were plucked by hand or sounded with plectrums made of wood, bone, or other materials.
The literature occasionally refers to the use of bowed instruments at the time the Bible was written. Under the entry “Geige,” for example, the Brockhaus/Riemann music dictionary notes that Luther translated a passage in 1 Samuel 8:6 as “fiddeln” in 1523 and “geygen” in 1534. This would seem an important indication of the very early existence of bowed instruments. Closer examination of the original Hebrew text, however, reveals a translation error in Luther’s version: the passage cannot refer to a bowed instrument. More recent translations instead speak of “hand drums … and cymbals” or of the “sound of lutes and tambourines.” This source therefore cannot serve as evidence for the bow’s development, although it does indicate the instrument’s—or instrument family’s—standing around 1530.
One very early bowed instrument still found among Buddhist monks in Asia is the ravanastron. According to legend, it was invented by Ravana, king of Ceylon, who is said to have ruled around 5000 BCE. Nothing is known about the truth of this story. It is recorded, however, that the instrument was played with horsehair coated in resin.
The first firm indications of bowed instruments in Central Asia appear in writings by prominent scholars such as al-Farabi (950), Ibn Sina (1037), and Ibn Saila (1048). Their classifications of musical instruments mention chordophones “whose strings are made to sound by rubbing them with other strings or with some kind of string-like material.” On the basis of these writings, Werner Bachmann makes a convincing case for locating the bow’s origins in Central Asia.

Two bowed instruments are known from 9th-century China: the xiqin, a two-stringed lute played with a bamboo bow between the strings, and the yazheng, a seven-stringed bowed zither rubbed between the strings with a bamboo bow. The xiqin may have resembled the erhu, the Chinese fiddle still in use today.
One of the earliest examples of bows in Europe appears in a manuscript in the National Library in Madrid, dating from around 920–930. It depicts fiddles and bows held by traveling musicians. Bachmann traces the bow’s route into Europe through miniatures in 11th-century Byzantine manuscripts. According to him, “the bow was introduced into Europe through Spain and Byzantium and applied to the fiddle- and lyre-shaped instruments native to the region, which are documented there earlier as plucked instruments.”

All these bows were strung with horsehair or a string-like material. In this early period of bowed instruments, bow shapes and lengths varied greatly and were not yet standardized. It is striking, however, that many early bows had a strongly convex curve, making them resemble the weapon of the same name.

In Lucas van Leyden’s 1524 depiction “Beggar Woman Playing the Fiddle,” the hair is tied to a curved stick made from a native wood.

No head is shown in this drawing. Instead, the hair is tied into a loop and hooked into a notch above a thickening at the tip of the stick. No frog is visible, but closer inspection shows that the hair is attached directly to the stick by a loop just above the index finger. The stick is slightly convex to keep the hair away from it during playing.

This Italian bow from the 16th century clearly shows the hair attached directly to the stick. The lower end of the stick may have been shortened, and the clip-in frog may be a later addition. Unlike the violin, whose qualities could usually be adapted to changing tastes through alterations, the bow was set aside once it went out of fashion. Perhaps it became firewood or a tomato stake in a vegetable patch. Making a new bow was easier than rebuilding an old one to meet new requirements. Surviving traveling musicians’ bows from this and later periods, used mainly for dance music, were made from native woods such as larch, willow, or beech—or, in this example, palm wood. By modern standards, these woods are much too soft and light because of their very low density.

The clip-in mechanism is particularly clear on a viola d’amore bow in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg. It belongs to a viola d’amore made by Caspar Stadler in Munich in 1714. Unfortunately, it is not known whether the bow was also made by him. This finely crafted work is made from a very dark tropical wood. Silver pins richly decorate both the end of the stick and the frog.

Some surviving 17th-century bows look crude. They were probably used by itinerant musicians and, as noted above, were usually made from native woods. Others, however, were carefully and artfully made. Their round or octagonal sticks were sometimes fluted in the upper half.

Material was removed in grooves so that the stick resembled a Greek column in cross section. This served both aesthetic and playing purposes. The bow’s balance point moved toward the frog, and the upper part became lighter without losing a corresponding amount of tensioning strength.

The period from 1770 to 1800 was marked by major political changes that culminated in the French Revolution of 1789. These changes also profoundly affected musical life. Previously, art music had been performed almost exclusively at aristocratic courts or in churches, with musicians dependent on their patrons and audiences limited to a small circle. Concerts now took place in civic concert societies. As middle-class audiences grew, so did the rooms in which music was performed. These new, large concert halls needed to be filled with sound. “Beginning in Paris, violin makers such as Pique and Lupot altered neck angles, neck lengths, bridges, and bass bars on both new instruments and outstanding older ones to meet the new demands. The bow also continued to develop. Overall, the stick became somewhat longer again; taller, stronger, and therefore heavier frogs were tried, and the head also grew taller and more substantial. A larger number of hairs made the bundle somewhat wider. The so-called Cramer bow emerged, often described then and now as a transitional model. Its large, heavy head shifted the balance point toward the middle of the bow. By modern standards, Cramer-model bows are very tip-heavy. The tall head, however, provides a large gap between hair and stick, allowing a deeper concave camber. The hair can now be tensioned more firmly. Bows of this type appear throughout Europe between 1770 and 1800, with the earliest documented examples in France.” The type was most popular between 1772 and 1792, and many bow makers responded to the strong demand. In France, these included Tourte L., Lafleur, and members of the Meauchand family. In England, they included Edward and John Dodd and makers working for Forster or Norris & Barnes. The type was also very popular in Germany. The photograph shows an elegant, fully developed example made between 1780 and 1790 and stamped MEAUCHAND.

This bow is an early work by F. X. Tourte. Its head already displays all the features of a modern bow. The frog has a ferrule, and the hair channel is covered by a mother-of-pearl slide. The decorations on both sides of the frog are also mother-of-pearl. Tourte’s sticks are now made exclusively of pernambuco, a material that ideally combines strength and elasticity. It is still used today for most high-quality modern bows. The metal ferrule introduced by Tourte transformed the hair from a sometimes almost round bundle into a flat ribbon 10 mm wide. The frog was not always ebony; it could also be made from precious materials such as ivory or tortoiseshell, sometimes protected against cracks and chips by a metal heel plate. The button, too, had metal fittings. François Tourte worked with a precision that still inspires wonder. Generations of bow makers after him tried—and continue to try—to copy his model. Tourte belonged to a generation of makers who did not always sign their bows at the end of the stick. His great success soon attracted imitators, first in Paris and later in England, Germany, and Russia.