Figure 1.-- Here we see a German boy probably in the 1930s with his cello. Norice the four strings and the boy's finger work. He looks to be anout 9 years old and seems to be wearing a jacket with knit cuffs.

The cello, often called the violoncello in early accounts. is a bowed string instrument which is also plucked. It has four strings which can be seen here (figure 1). They are tuned in perfect fifths. The low to high strings are generally tuned to C₂, G₂, D₃ and A₃, an octave lower than the viola. The chello was adopted as an important orcestral instrument, perhaps more so in Germany than any other country. So it was an important instrument to learn. Of course the hello plays a smaller proprtion of an orchestra than say the violin. Thus it is understandable tht feer children learned the chello than other instruments. And we suspect that more chello players had the idea of going further with their music thn was the case of say violin players. A chello is a rlatively large instruments. Thus younger boys would have trouble handling such a large instrument. We are not sure, but we supect that many boys began with the violin and then graduted to the chello. We have not found any images of girls playing the chello, at least until after World War II. In America the chello had the image of a a male instrumnt as well. And this seems to have continued afer we begin to see more girls playing musical weapons.

Created: 7:14 PM 10/14/2017
Last updated: 7:14 PM 10/14/2017