How a Fiddle Differs from a Violin

Video Transcript

Hi! I’m David Kaynor with expertvillage.com. Exploring the age old tormenting question, what is the difference between the violin and the fiddle? Well in some quarters you can hear some of this wise crack retort about $10,000, and that… there’s a certain amount of validity in that because it’s often assumed that a serious violin for a high class formal player would be a more expensive instrument. Whereas a lot of folk fiddlers can get by with fiddle tacked together from a cigar box, which has been done. On the other hand, basically a lot of the time it’s the same instrument. And the term fiddle I believe is an older term than the violin, I believe the violin is the English word for whatever it was called in Italy where it was evolved, and I don’t remember what they called it there then. But we call it the violin, and I think that there are words in some of the European languages which translate and even sound pretty close to a fiddle, like in Sweden it’s a Fiol the violin and the fiddle, Fiol. And how it’s played influences what a person calls it, I think it’s often thought that when someone is really having fun with the music, maybe playing a little bit spontaneously as opposed to doing a careful formalized note for note recitation, that player would be fiddling or fiddling around or fiddling around with a tune and that’s a term that’s crept into our English language. Anyway if you just kind of play with something, even a piece of string you are said to be fiddling with a piece of string. I remember my old fishing boss use to say, “Don’t fiddle with that gear, we’re behind” and so the fiddle in the violin can be the same instrument, and the term used maybe expresses some feelings about it and about the music. I think I’ve read of Itzhak Perlman calling his Stradivarius violin a fiddle, and sometimes we fiddlers with our old beat up instruments that we acquired inexpensively still refer to them as violins; and it’s not even easy to predict when I’m going to call it one and when I’m going to call it the other.

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