the.com/violin
four strings, ten thousand hours, and the closest a box of wood gets to weeping
means A small, high-pitched, four-stringed instrument played with a bow (or plucked), held under the chin and central to orchestras and folk traditions alike.
from From Italian 'violino,' a diminutive of 'viola' — so literally a 'little viola.' 'Viola' itself comes from Medieval Latin 'vitula,' a stringed instrument, possibly linked to Vitula, a Roman goddess of joy and celebration, or to the verb 'vitulari,' to be joyful. The same root branches off into 'fiddle' (via Old English 'fithele') and 'viol,' making the violin and the fiddle close cousins under two different names.
- build
- around 70 separate pieces of wood inside
- strung
- strings once made from sheep gut, not cat
- value
- a Stradivarius can sell past 15 million dollars
- physics
- horsehair bow grips strings via friction and rosin
- size
- smallest in the violin family, highest pitch
stradivarius messiah — 1694 violin owned by ashmolean museum, valued over $15 million
guarneri del gesu 1742 — played by itzhak perlman, one of the most valuable violins ever made
paganini's cannon — 1742 guarneri used by niccolò paganini, now in palazzo tursi genoa