Musical Periods

Long ago, most written music was sung. In the Middle Ages, the time of knights and castles, people in churches and monasteries sang chant: one tune with no harmony, in Latin. One of the first composers we know by name, Hildegard of Bingen, ran a community of nuns in Germany about 900 years ago and wrote many of these songs.

Little by little, singers added a second tune alongside the chant, then more, until several tunes sounded together. Players bowed string instruments too: the fiddle-like vielle, and later the viols, which have frets like a guitar and rest upright on the lap or between the legs. About 500 years ago, in a time called the Renaissance, the first violins appeared in Italy, along with bigger relatives that became the viola and the cello. At first they mostly played music for dancing.

Sing a short, simple tune while a grown-up sings the same tune starting five notes lower. Singing two parts at once like that is how some of the first written harmony sounded.

Two things from these centuries still shape string playing. The first is polyphony. Medieval singers learned to add a voice to a chant, at first moving in parallel fourths and fifths, and Renaissance composers built that into full counterpoint, every line its own melody. Every string quartet inherits that idea of independent voices.

The second is the instruments themselves. The viols, fretted and played upright, were the main bowed instruments of Renaissance chamber music and came before the violin, which arrived louder and brighter and played mostly for dancing and outdoor occasions. By the 1590s, Venetian composers such as Giovanni Gabrieli were writing for the violin family in church. His Sonata pian' e forte of 1597, whose one string part was written for an alto violin, close to today's viola, is among the first pieces to mark loud and soft in the score.

About 400 years ago, in a time called the Baroque, the violin became the leading instrument. In Italy, violinists who also composed, like Arcangelo Corelli and Antonio Vivaldi, wrote concertos: pieces where one player, or a small group, has the starring part and a larger group backs it up. Vivaldi's The Four Seasons is four violin concertos about spring, summer, fall, and winter, with birdsong, a summer storm, and shivering in the snow.

In Germany, Johann Sebastian Bach wrote six suites for cello with no one playing along, which violists play too, and music for violin alone. Much music from this time rests on a low part called the continuo, played by a keyboard player and a cellist together. Pieces in the Suzuki books come from these years too: the minuets in violin Book 1, written in Bach's time, and Vivaldi's A minor concerto in violin Book 4.

Play one phrase of a minuet loudly, then again softly, like an echo. Sudden changes between loud and soft are part of the Baroque sound.

The Baroque made the violin the leading voice of instrumental music, and Italian violinist-composers set the patterns others followed. Corelli's sonatas and concertos became models across Europe, and Italian words for tempo and character, such as Adagio and Allegro, spread with them. Heinrich Biber's Rosary Sonatas retune the violin for nearly every piece and close with a passacaglia for violin alone.

A suite strung together dances such as the allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue, the plan behind Bach's suites for cello alone. Bach also gave the viola a lead: his Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 puts two violas at the front and uses no violins at all. In Cremona, Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri "del Gesù" built instruments that soloists still play, and in Paris Élisabeth Jacquet de La Guerre printed sonatas for violin and harpsichord in 1707.

About 275 years ago, music changed again. Composers wanted tunes that were clear and balanced, like a question and an answer, with a simple accompaniment underneath. This is the Classical period, the time of Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and the young Ludwig van Beethoven.

Mozart grew up with a violin in the house: his father, Leopold, wrote a book on how to play it, published the year Wolfgang was born. Mozart wrote five violin concertos as a teenager, and advanced Suzuki students play two of them. Haydn wrote dozens of string quartets, music for two violins, a viola, and a cello. Luigi Boccherini, who wrote the Minuet at the end of violin Book 2, was a cellist.

The Gavotte by Gossec at the end of violin Book 1 is a Classical piece too. Play it and listen for its neat, even phrases.

The Classical style prized clarity: themes in balanced phrases, harmony that changes at an unhurried pace, and long forms built from contrast and return. Sonata form gave a movement a plan the listener could follow: two key areas set out, developed, and brought home. That plan shaped the first movements of concertos, quartets, and symphonies.

The tools and the teaching changed too. Around the 1780s the bow maker François Xavier Tourte settled the design of the modern bow, with a stick that curves inward. Leopold Mozart's 1756 violin method shaped teaching, and his son Wolfgang wrote all five of his violin concertos as a teenager. In Wolfgang's Sinfonia Concertante, he wrote the viola part for an instrument tuned a half step higher than usual, so it would sound brighter beside the violin. Many violists today play it in normal tuning. Maddalena Laura Sirmen, a pupil of Tartini, toured Europe as a soloist and published her own violin concertos.

About 200 years ago, composers began to write music about their own feelings, like joy and longing, and about stories and dreams. This is the Romantic period. Orchestras grew larger, and star soloists, called virtuosos, traveled from city to city to play for big crowds.

Niccolò Paganini was a violinist so fast and daring that some listeners whispered he had made a deal with the devil. He wrote 24 Caprices for violin alone, which violinists still use to test their technique, and he asked the composer Hector Berlioz for a piece for viola and orchestra. You can meet Paganini in violin Book 2: the Theme from Witches' Dance is a tune he borrowed for a set of variations. Cellists play The Swan by Camille Saint-Saëns, and The Happy Farmer, which you play in violin Book 1, is by Robert Schumann.

Play a slow piece you know two ways: first exactly in time, then slowing a little and growing louder where the tune climbs. Stretching the beat to show feeling is part of the Romantic style.

Romanticism treated music as personal expression, and touring string soloists carried it to large public audiences. Paganini's concerts and his 24 Caprices for solo violin made hard, fast playing the reason audiences came, and the violinists who followed, among them Henri Vieuxtemps, Henryk Wieniawski, and Pablo de Sarasate, wrote showpieces for their own concerts, such as Sarasate's Zigeunerweisen. Louis Spohr, a violinist and composer, is credited with inventing the chin rest, which he described in his violin method of 1832.

Many works came out of friendships between composers and players. Brahms wrote his Violin Concerto for Joseph Joachim, and Clara Schumann wrote her Three Romances for violin and piano for Joachim as well. Brahms arranged his two late clarinet sonatas for viola himself. The American composer Amy Beach premiered her Violin Sonata in A minor with the violinist Franz Kneisel, and Dvořák wrote his Cello Concerto in New York for the cellist Hanuš Wihan.

Since 1900, composers have gone in many directions. Claude Debussy wrote music with the whole-tone scale, which has no clear home note. Béla Bartók collected folk songs from villages and wrote 44 duets for two violins. Some composers write music for movies, played by orchestras full of violins, violas, and cellos.

The Suzuki method belongs to this time as well. Shinichi Suzuki, a violinist in Japan, noticed that every child learns to speak by listening, and built a way to learn music the same way. That is why you listen to your pieces before you play them.

Ask your teacher for a piece for violin, viola, or cello written in your own lifetime. Listen to it, then to a piece by Bach or Mozart, and ask: which one has a home note you could hum at the end?

The twentieth century loosened the rules of key that had held since the Baroque. Debussy used scales without a pull toward one note, Schoenberg treated all twelve pitches as equals, and Stravinsky and Bartók wrote rhythms with uneven accents, often drawn from folk music; Bartók's 44 Duos for two violins came from that same interest. Later, minimalists such as Philip Glass and Steve Reich built music from repeating patterns, and Arvo Pärt's Fratres and Spiegel im Spiegel brought slow, spare writing to wide audiences.

The instrument and its teaching changed as well. After World War I most violinists switched to a steel E string, and gut strings slowly became less common. Recordings let players hear soloists from around the world, and new teaching methods spread, among them the one Shinichi Suzuki built in Japan in the mid-1900s. Composers kept writing for particular players: the violist William Primrose commissioned Bartók's Viola Concerto, and Mstislav Rostropovich premiered Britten's cello suites. Players wrote music too, among them the violinist Fritz Kreisler, whose short pieces such as Liebesleid violinists still play.