The violin bow, in its earliest form, was nothing more than an ordinary bow with a stretched string; Corelli and Tartini used a bow of the kind.  The present shape of the bow is due to Tourte, a Paris maker, who experimented in conjunction with Viotti, the celebrated violinist.

By looking at the original lute and the Arabian rebeck or Welsh crwth (originally Latin chorus), we can see how the modern violin received its generally rounded shape from the lute, its flatness from the rebeck, the sides of the instrument being cut out in order to give the bow free access to the side strings.  The name too, fidula or vidula, from mediaeval Latin fides, “string,” became fiddle and viola, the smaller viola being called violino, the larger, violoncello and viola da gamba.

In the Middle Ages, the different species of bowed instrument numbered from fifteen to twenty, and it was not until between 1600 and 1700 that the modern forms of these instruments obtained the ascendancy.

Of the wind instruments it was naturally the flute that retained its antique form; the only difference between the modern instrument and the ancient one being that the former is blown crosswise, instead of perpendicularly.  Quantz, the celebrated court flute player to Frederick the Great of Prussia, was the first to publish, in 1750, a so-called “method” of playing the traversal (crosswise) flute.

With the reed instruments the change in modern times is more striking.  The original form of the reed instruments was of the double-reed variety.  The oldest known mention of them dates from 650 A.D., when the name applied is calamus (reed); later the names shalmei (chalumeau, “straw,” from German halm) and shawm were used.  These instruments were played by means of a bell-shaped mouthpiece, the double reed being fixed inside the tube.  It was not until toward the end of the sixteenth century that the bell-shaped mouthpiece was dispensed with and the reed brought directly to the lips, thus giving the player greater power of expression.  The oboe is a representative type of the higher pitched double-reed instruments.  In its present shape it is about two hundred years old.  As the deeper toned instruments were necessarily very long, six to eight and even ten feet, an assistant had to walk before the performer, holding the tube on his shoulder.  This inconvenience led to bending the tube back on itself, making it look somewhat like a bundle of sticks, hence the word faggot; although it is commonly known in this country by the French name, bassoon.  This manner of arranging the instrument dates from about the year 1550.  The clarinet is an essentially modern instrument, the single beating reed and cylindrical tube coming into use about 1700, the invention of a German named Denner, who lived at Nuremberg.