Abstract
Strings of musical instruments can be excited by plucking, bowing or striking and can vibrate in several modes. The main parameters which characterize the strings are the diameter, the length, the mass per unit length, the stiffness, the normal playing tension and the inharmonicity of the overtones. Inharmonocity is favoured by short, thick and high stiffness strings. Strings are made in organic materials (gut and silk) or in metal. Strings in gut and silk are used for lutes and guitars, for the instruments from the violin family and harps. Gut strings are made from animal intestines. Silk strings are produced from mulberry silkworm protein fibres. Strings produced with natural materials are very flexible and have remarkable mechanical properties, but are very sensitive to the variations of temperature and relative humidity of the air which affect their pitch. For increasing stability of lower pitch strings it is common to introduce an extra mass, which is a metallic layer used to overwind the strings having a gut, silk or metallic core. Different alloys – brass, copper, iron, steel, silver and gold have been used for metallic strings of keyboard instruments. Harps have gut and metallic strings. Piano strings are exclusively in steel, the lower strings are overlapped with copper or brass to add mass and to reduce the high stiffness of steel.
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Appendix: Iconographic Evidence Related to the Quality of Gut Strings of the 16th and 18th Centuries
Appendix: Iconographic Evidence Related to the Quality of Gut Strings of the 16th and 18th Centuries
Musical iconography is a branch of art history and in the same time a very useful tool for the musical organology and history of musical instruments (Getreau 2006).
The place of the musical instruments in still life paintings is discussed by De Pascale (1996). Musical instruments have been represented on portraits, on which the characters are playing different instruments. In Italian language such instruments are defined as “i strumenti che suona” (instruments which are played). In still life the musical instruments are the main subject of the painting and are static and silent (i strumenti che non suona), and presented with precise details of their construction. The famous Baroque painters of still life with musical instruments in Italy were Evaristo Baschensis (1617–1677), his pupil Bartolomeo Bettera (1639–1688), both actives in Bergamo and Cristoforo Munari (1667–1720) painter at Medici’s’ Court in Florence. Bergamo is in the proximity of Cremona famous region for the production of the best string instruments of that era. These paintings about musical instruments had beside the artistic value, a commercial one, by presenting and promoting the instruments produced locally. Dutch painters presented musical instruments as accessories for the characters painted, but less frequently as the main subject of the still life (17th century—Cornelis de Heem, Piete Claesz).
Through musical iconography Peruffo (1993) intended to demonstrate that the gut strings produced during 16th and 17th centuries were extremely flexible. He cited Baschensis’s paintings on which are represented curly strings on plucked or bowed instruments. (Figure 10.38). Such an example is shown in next figure (Fig. 10.39) on which the gut strings of the violin and cello are clearly depicted. Another naturalistic representation of musical instruments can be seen in Fig. 10.40
Diameters of different strings on baroque violin are visible in Fig. 10.41.
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Bucur, V. (2016). Strings for Musical Instruments of the Baroque and Romantic Periods. In: Handbook of Materials for String Musical Instruments. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32080-9_10
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