The first cellos were made in Italy in the 16th century. Composers wanted a lower toned instrument in their music, so an instrument which is an octave lower than violas or an octave and a fifth lower than violins was made. The cello is correctly called violincello, which in Italian means "little violone". It refers to the fact that the cello was developed from the relatively unknown bass violin and not from the viol as many believe. The double bass was later evolved from the cello.
Beethoven and Bach took to the cello
The cello soon became very popular among royal families. Beethoven and Bach were the first composers to make the cello a big part of their compositions and there were soon a lot of cello players evolved. The cello is today a very essential instrument, on its own, in quartets, and in orchestras.
Cello maker, Andrea Amati
The first known cello maker was Andrea Amati. He made cellos for the French king, Charles IX, with lots of decorations, such as carvings, painting and mottoes of the king. Andrea Amati's two sons, Girolamo and Antonio, were also celli makers. Andrea Amati's grandson, Nicolo is perceived as the best luthier of the Amati family, and the greatest maker of violins and celli of all times, the famous Antonio Stradivari, was one of his students.
Changes to the original cello design
At first the cello didn't have an end pin. It was soon to be a standard feature though, after a cello player carved a stick out of wood to hold his cello while he played, and other cello players loved the idea. The size of the cello has increased a bit in both height and width, to make the cello easier to play. Besides these changes to the original cello, the design has not changed much over the past centuries. The size of the modern cello was standardized by Antonio Stradivari.
Violin
The violin emerged in Italy in the early 1500s and seems to have evolved from two medieval bowed instruments—the fiddle, also called viele or fiedel, and the rebec—and from the Renaissance lira da braccio (a violinlike instrument with off-the-fingerboard drone strings). Also related, but not a direct ancestor, is the viol, a fretted, six-string instrument that appeared in Europe before the violin and existed side by side with it for about 200 years.
The earliest important violin makers were the northern Italians Gasparo da Salň (1540-1609) and Giovanni Maggini (1579–1630?) from Brescia and Andrea Amati from Cremona. The craft of violin making reached unprecedented artistic heights in the 17th and early 18th centuries in the workshops of the Italians Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri, both from Cremona, and the Austrian Jacob Stainer.
Compared with the modern instrument, the early violin had a shorter, thicker neck that was less angled back from the violin's front; a shorter fingerboard; a flatter bridge; and strings made solely of gut. Early bows were somewhat different in design from modern ones. These construction details were all modified in the 18th and 19th centuries to give the violin a louder, more robust, more brilliant tone. A number of 20th-century players have restored their 18th-century instruments to the original specifications, believing them more suited for early music.
By the mid-18th century the violin was one of the most popular solo instruments in European music. Violins also formed the leading section of the orchestra, the most important instrumental ensemble to emerge in both the baroque and classical (1750?-1820?) eras; and in the modern orchestra—still the most important instrumental ensemble in Western music—the violin family continues to account for more than half the players. The predominant chamber-music ensemble, the string quartet, consists of two violins, viola, and cello.
Among composers of major solo and chamber works for the violin are Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Ludwig van Beethoven in the baroque and classical eras; the Austrian Franz Schubert, the Germans Johannes Brahms, Felix Mendelssohn, and Robert Schumann, and the Russian Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky in the romantic era; and the French Claude Debussy, the Austrian Arnold Schoenberg, the Hungarian Béla Bartók, and the Russian-born Igor Stravinsky in the 20th century. --Encarta 2005
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