A bowed instrument played by the Wends or Sorbs of eastern Germany and Slavonic countries certainly since the 17th century and possibly earlier. In general outline it somewhat resembles a medieval fiddle (from which type it is derived), the bouts being less pronounced than on the violin. The back is flat, the belly curved and the ribs of uneven depth. The soundholes consist of a rose by the fingerboard, and two narrow rectangular holes near the curved bridge. The short neck ends in a flat pegholder into which the pegs are set from behind; the tailpiece is long. The 18th-century example at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts has a soundpost but no bass-bar. The instrument is held across the chest and supported by a strap, as were many fiddles in that part of Europe during the Middle Ages. The traditional tuning of the three gut strings is d'–a'–e''. The performer plays the melody with his fingernails against the top string, leaving the others free to drone, thus accounting for the derivation of the word husla from the Slavonic root gusti, meaning to drone or resound.
By the early 20th century the greater potentialities of the violin had made the husla almost extinct, and in 1923 there remained only one master of the old tradition, Jan Kusík (whose portrait, by Ludvík Kuba, is in the National Museum at Prague). Through his efforts, and those of the clockmaker J. Mencl (Menzel), the instrument managed to survive, and since 1950 it has acquired a new lease of life, as a result of the revival of interest in folk culture of eastern Europe. An evocative illustration of the husla can be seen in the woodcut Sorbian Fiddler by Conrad Felixmüller (1897–1977; see illustration).
MGG2 (D. Kobjela)
G. Kinsky: Musikhistorisches Museum von Wilhelm Heyer in Cöln: Katalog, i–ii, iv (Cologne, 1910–16)
C. Sachs: Real-Lexikon der Musikinstrumente (Berlin, 1913/R)
A. Hammerich: Das musikhistorische Museum zu Kopenhagen: beschreibender Katalog (Copenhagen and Leipzig, 1911), 102–03
F.W. Galpin: A Textbook of European Musical Instruments (London, 1937, 3/1956/R)
A. Buchner: Musical Instruments through the Ages (London, 1955), pl. 315 [portrait by Ludvík Kuba of Jan Kusík playing the husla]
L. Kunz: ‘Die Bauernfiedeln’, Zwischen Kunstgeschichte und Volkskunde: Festschrift für Wilhelm Fraenger (Berlin, 1960), 134–53
J. Raupp: Sorbische Volksmusikanten und Musikinstrumente, xvii (Bautzen, 1963), 191ff
W. Bachmann: Die Anfänge des Streichinstrumentenspiels (Leipzig, 1964, 2/1966), 104; (Eng. trans., 1969 as The Origins of Bowing), 89
A. Baines: The Oxford Companion to Musical Instruments (Oxford, 1992), 110
MARY REMNANT