Locating the bridge

Greg Dean Petersen ('Bridge location on the early Italian violin', EM, xxxv/1 (Feb 2007), pp.49-64) has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the early performance history of the violin, amplifying as he has David Boyden's observations concerning the lack of standardization of bridge position during the first century or so of the instrument's existence. I believe, however, that two important factors affecting bridge placement have been left out of the discussion, the first being pitch and the second, players' use of higher hand positions.

The first of these considerations is hinted at by Boyden in his speculation (quoted by Petersen) that 'possibly a longer string length was being sought'. (As reported by Petersen, Boyden suggested alternatively that 'possibly a certain tone quality' was the goal; he had expanded upon this idea in his History of violin playing from its origins to 1761 (London, 1965), p.34, in a quote from Sol Babitz—one of the pioneers in the 20th-century revival of the early violin—who claimed that the lower position of the bridge imparts a 'silky viola-like tone'. Babitz, it should be noted, may have misidentified the actual cause of this change in timbre, which may have had more to do with the muting effect of placing the bridge very near the end of the tailpiece or with distancing the bridge from the soundpost than with bridge position per se. It is very difficult in making such experiments to isolate the active variable, since making any one change to such a complex interactive system entails concomitant changes to other variables—changes whose effect may not be so obvious.) Since the time Boyden was formulating his ideas in the 1960s, organologists have come to have a much more sophisticated understanding of stringed instrument design in terms of the interrelationship of pitch standards and the behaviour of string materials. Starting with Djilda Abbott and Ephraim Segerman's seminal article 'Strings in the 16th and 17th centuries' (Galpin Society Journal, xxvii (May 1974), pp.48-73), there have been numerous investigations and conjectures concerning early string-making techniques and approaches to stringing. While debate continues regarding the exact nature of early gut and its manipulation (and thus about the precise limitations imposed by its use), there is consensus regarding the general principles involved: in the period before the invention (sometime near the middle of the 17th century) and dispersal of the overspinning of gut with metal wire, the pitch of an instrument—such as the violin—with gut strings all of the same length would have been limited in the upward direction by the breaking pitch of the top string and in the downward direction by the poor timbre and response of thick, solid gut bass strings.

It is reasonable to assume that the luthiers of Northern Italy who were responsible for establishing the form and dimensions of the violin would have worked them out with the high instrumental pitch standards typical of their region in mind. It also seems reasonable that those builders involved in developing and refining such a complex acoustical system—creating a design so successful in its particulars that it has remained in use with only minor alterations until the present day—would not only have sought to find the most propitious location for the bridge (the 'sweet spot', so to speak), but that they would also have wished to define such a placement with repeatability in mind. We, of course, cannot know for certain that the bridge position we now recognize as standard was always so defined by early builders, but the fact that a placement defined by the notches in the f-holes has long been accepted as 'the' position of the bridge strongly suggests, at least, that such positioning was part of luthiers' tradition (unwritten, of course) since the beginning. Builders, in any case, could not have been in control of whatever 'after-market' decisions were made by the users of their products, and it is probable that violinists tuning to lower pitch standards would have found the short vibrating string length implied by the f-hole notches to be disadvantageous. Under...