If I had a dollar for every time someone has asked me at a wedding reception or a coffeehouse gig if I play fiddle or violin, I could quit my day job and spend more time playing my – well, violin or fiddle. I usually answer, “They’re really the same instrument, just different kinds of music.” You know: violin is for classical and jazz while fiddle is for folk, country, and bluegrass.

But is that really true? The cover of Strings magazine proclaims it is “for players of violin, viola, cello, bass, and fiddle” as if violin and fiddle are separate and distinct.

But what exactly is the difference? Since we know pretty well what a violin is, the question boils down to, “What is a fiddle?”

Over in the musicology department, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians defines “fiddle” as “a generic term for any chordophone [stringed instrument] played with a bow.” This instrument group includes the violin and many other instruments as diverse as the one-string goge of sub-Saharan Africa, having a gourd sound box covered with iguana or boa skin; the North Indian sarangi, with playing strings stopped by the fingernails and 35 sympathetic strings; and the rebab, a spike fiddle whose quavering song floats on top of the metallophones in the gamelan orchestras of Java and Bali.

Western classical players sometimes use “fiddle” as an affectionate term for the violin, that intimate companion and workmate. But in the United States, most often “fiddle” means the violin as used in Irish-Scottish-French traditional music and all the descendant American styles: Appalachian, bluegrass, Cajun, etc.♣

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