True fiddler's
magic belonged to the cat whose fiddling made the cow jump over the
moon, the little dog laugh and the dish run away with the spoon. Rarely
accomplished too was the cat that came fiddling out of the barn with a
pair of bagpipes under her arm, singing "Fiddle cum fee, the mouse has
married the humble bee."
Scientists tell us that crickets, grasshoppers, locusts and the like are
fiddlers. Their hind legs are their fiddle-bows, and by drawing these
briskly up and down the projecting veins of their wing-covers they
produce the sounds that characterize them. Was it in imitation of these
small winged creatures that man first experimented with the friction of
bow and strings as a means of making music? Scarcely. It was the result
of similar instinct on a larger human scale.
String instruments played with a bow may be traced to a remote period
among various Oriental peoples. An example of their simplest form exists
in the ravanastron, or banjo-fiddle, supposed to have been invented by
King Ravana, who reigned in Ceylon some 5,000 years ago.
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