A type of violin developed for early gramophone recordings by (John Matthias) Augustus Stroh (b Frankfurt, 7 May 1828; d London, 2 Nov 1914) in London between 1899 and 1901; it was manufactured in London by his son Charles Stroh from 1901 to 1924 and then by George Evans until 1942. Augustus settled in Britain in 1851 and worked as an engineer and inventor in the fields of electrical telegraphy and acoustics; he was Charles Wheatstone's assistant from the mid-1850s until the latter's death in 1875. From 1878 he experimented with gramophone recording. Until the advent of electrical recording techniques in the early 1920s the sounds made by the performers usually had to be directed at a single large horn; those of a normal body of strings were neither sufficiently loud nor sufficiently directional to record well, so Stroh devised an appropriate instrument which incorporated elements of the gramophone.
The body of the Stroh violin consists of a long, narrow piece of wood, the upper surface of which serves as the fingerboard, and a flexible membrane, to which a straight metal horn is attached, mounted at one side of the bridge. Concert models feature a second, smaller horn directed towards the player. The tone, perhaps surprisingly, is not at all metallic. A few violas, cellos, double basses, guitars, Hawaiian steel guitars and mandolins based on this principle were also produced by the Strohs. The Stroh violin was played in dance bands and in the open air until World War II, and is still occasionally used for Morris dancing. Patents for horned violins were issued in the USA to a dozen other inventors between 1900 and 1949. Modified copies of the Stroh violin are still manufactured in Myanmar, and similar instruments are built for Transylvanian dance music, based on the German-made Tiebel-Radio violin from the 1920s. In 1973 Franz-Ernst Peschke in Darmstadt constructed similar instruments for Kagel's 1898, in which the bells of a trumpet, trombone, flugelhorn and sousaphone were attached to the bodies of (respectively) a violin, viola, cello and double bass. The Stroh violin is featured in Hugh Davies's music theatre work The Birth of Live Electronic Music (1971) and, in the 1990s, in scores by Dennis James for 1920s silent films.
A single-string variant of the Stroh violin, known as the Phonofiddle, was introduced in 1904 by Arthur Howson; it was normally tuned to d'. Several manufacturers, including Charles Stroh, produced models with straight or curved horns (some under the names One String Fiddle or Japanese Fiddle).
J. Pilling: Fiddles with Horns, GSJ, xxviii (1975), 8692
C. Clements: Augustus Stroh and the Famous Stroh Violin, Experimental Musical Instruments, x/4 (19945), 815; xi/1 (19956), 389
C. Clements: Historical Patents for Horned Violins, Experimental Musical Instruments, xiii/2 (19978), 3741
C. Clements: Extra, Extra: Stroh Violins Still Being Made!!!, Experimental Musical Instruments, xiv/4 (19989), 7882
HUGH DAVIES