Monday Musical Offering Violins Violence edition

I have written here before about how wonderful Stradivari violins are, and how they have a hold on the popular imagination.  One thing that’s not well-publicized about them, and that I had no clue about until I was more thoroughly introduced to the world of lutherie, is that the “Stradivarius” instruments performed on today are quite different from what left Antonio’s shop back in the early 1700’s. 

The difference between the Stradivarius that left the maker’s hands three hundred years ago and the instrument played today is akin to the difference between a Model A Ford, fresh from the Dearborn assembly line, and a tangerine-orange-sparkle chopped and modded Deuce Coupe hot rod.  Some of the modifications to the violins are simply a matter of maintenance—cleats to repair cracks, or patches to make up for distortion from the sound post.  

However, most of the modifications affect the performance of the instruments.  Bass bars have been replaced—part of normal maintenance, but the replacements are generally much beefier than the original slivers of spruce.  The tailgut attachments would be unfamiliar to Antonio.  Fingerboards have been replaced by something narrower, longer, and lighter.  All necks are modern replacements: Cremonese necks were actually (*gasp*) nailed to the body of the violin, while new necks are mortised into place.  Also, the neck angle is quite different from what Stradivari installed.  In addition to such structural issues, almost all surviving fiddles have been polished and revarnished an unknown number of times. 

All this modification leads to instruments perfect for a modern style of playing, but they are not what their author intended.  There is a movement towards playing baroque music—the music of Stradivarius’ time—on instruments that have either been left in their original state, or newly made to baroque spec.  However, it’s hard to find great original instruments.  If an instrument was good, then its owners generally paid to have it kept up-to-date.  Those instruments left untouched were, frankly, not touched a whole lot to begin with.  Nonetheless, the original instruments movement has its dedicated, sometimes fanatical adherents.

This leads to an intriguing story.  I have to be circumspect in relating this, since it is something that is being actively kept out of the news by the request of the concerned parties.  I found out about it through a person I am at liberty to describe only as a well-connected-friend-of-a-luthier in the Eastern Hemisphere.  However, as a story of musical intrigue and deceit, it ranks with the recorded legacy of Joyce Hatto, and I think it ought to be public.  Such is life in the internet age; keeping secrets is impossible and trying is futile. 

One of the 20^th century’s greatest violinists was Erika Morini.  A child prodigy, she had a shining career performing around the world until her retirement in the 1970’s, after which her star rapidly faded.  Since her 20’s, she played on a 1727 Strad, known as the “Davidoff.”  She kept the fiddle after her retirement, almost until her death in 1995.  At some time during her terminal illness, when she was on her sickbed, the Davidoff, along with much of her musical and artistic memorabilia, was stolen.  The case has never been cracked, and the Davidoff-Morini Strad, worth over $3.5 million, vanished. 

Until, maybe, now.  About a year ago, a nondescript box from a nonexistent address in Madagascar arrived at the Chei Mi Museum in Taiwan.  It contained a violin.  The body and scroll and label appear, by every test, to be those of the Davidoff-Morini.  Comparisons of the mystery instrument with the best available photographs match, scar for scar, tree-ring for tree-ring.  However, the fiddle has been modified from when it was last seen almost twenty years ago.  A proper Baroque fingerboard has been fitted, underneath gut strings and a lower bridge.  The neck has (with extraordinary workmanship) been replaced by one fitted in the ancient method.  In perhaps the most shocking and visible bit of work, the instrument has been completely revarnished, with no regard to preserving the few scraps of original finish—it was varnished as if it were a new instrument.  It is clear that incredible effort and skill had been used in restoring the Davidoff-Morini to its 1727 condition. 

No individual has taken responsibility for this bizarre un-theft and anti-vandalism, although there was a note accompanying the violin.  The note was a manifesto, in French, signed by the executive committee of the “Stradivari Liberation Front.”  My contact sent me some camera-phone pictures, but between my poor French and poor lighting I can only approximate the manifesto's contents.  It avers that the instrument is the Davidoff-Morini.  It goes on to cite the “atrocities committed by Vuillaume and his legion of ...[unclear]… race for louder and higher and brighter noise,” and the history of insults to “the master of all of us luthiers.” Apparently the goal of the SLF is to “acquire, by legal means or otherwise,” great classic instruments and “rescue them from abasement and slavery and restore them to their rightful [unclear: ?condition?].”  The note apparently urges the Chei Mi, as “responsible guardians of the heritage of the world” to treasure the violin and present it before the public, playing the music it was meant to play, played in the style it was meant to be played.

Needless to say, this has caused a deal of consternation, though it has been kept very hush-hush.  The instrument has not been displayed, nor played in public (my contact insists that it sounds incredible).  The insurers—and it’s not clear how they found out about the instrument—dryly maintain that it is the Davidoff-Morini, and since they paid the claim when it was stolen, they are the owners.  The Chei Mi has not acknowledged the incident, officially or unofficially, although I’m told they intend to keep the instrument as "a violin of uncertain provenance, attributed to Stradivari, acquired by anonymous gift."

What brings this to a head—where the story gets so good that my contact couldn’t keep silent any more—is the arrival of another nondescript box from a nonexistent address (this time in Suriname) at the Chei Mi Museum.  It contained, by every test, the 1734 “Ames” Stradivari, perfectly restored to “authentic” condition.  The “Ames” was stolen in 1981, and its last known owner, Roman Totenberg, died last year.  The violin came with another note from the Stradivari Liberation Front, hinting at more to come and naming some names, but only if the instruments were played in public as the SLF intended.  This could get interesting. 

Monday Musical Offering Frontiers in Lutherie Edition

I played a good Stradivari violin once, just for a few minutes. I’m a lousy violinist, but it was an amazing experience.  On the same occasion, I played a good Guarneri “del Gesu,” and it was equally amazing.  Now, every other violin is just not so good. 

This is one of the great problems of the violin-building world.  There are maybe a thousand or so of these exceptional old violins out there.  Their number can only decrease; they are getting more and more expensive (one recently sold for north of $18 million; the New York Times had to correct its initial report that it had sold for $18 billion).  There are some excellent modern makers out there, making some excellent violins for a fraction of that price, but if they are honest, they’ll concede that they are still chasing the old Cremonese makers.  Meanwhile, anyone owning one of these treasures gets increasingly nervous whenever they enter a taxi or relinquish their instruments to the TSA. 

Modern luthiers have tried all manner of tricks to match the old masters.  Some claim to divine mathematical and geometrical formulae from the shapes of the old violins.  Some “tune” their fiddles by watching the patterned dance of iron filings as they blast the wood with amplified sound.  Some find markings in the wood of these old fiddles and from these scratches extrapolate whole systems of woodworking. Several Cremonese fiddles have been so thoroughly studied, by CT scans, X-rays, UV imaging, density mapping, frequency mapping, dynamic FLIR, HPLC analysis—as to become open books. 

Then there are the dilettantes, techies with their particular tools.  Every year, like clockwork, one solves the “Secret of Stradivari.” It’s propolis in the varnish!  It’s wood soaked in the river Po! It’s fungus! It’s pollen in the varnish!  It’s wood from trees grown during the “little ice age”! Strangely, these discoveries have done nothing to change the status quo: Strads are still Strads, and everything else is still everything else. 

I write this as an introduction to an enlightening and confounding conversation I had, which I attempt to document here.  The Real Doctor and I attended a performance by the Miskatonic Pro(-Am) Musica.  The program was conventional, and the performance was what might be expected from a mixture of professionals and enthusiastic amateurs.  One of those amateurs is Dr. D. Avril Poisson, a biologist of some note.  Dr. Poisson’s fiddle was extremely unusual, and as the Real Doctor and I are students of lutherie, we sought her out after the performance, and she graciously talked with us (she apparently is aware of my having provided her with some favorable publicity). 

In its form, Dr. Poisson’s fiddle was classic—the front had deep arching and a well-formed recurve, very much in the earlier Cremonese style; the outline, scroll, and f-holes also were suggestive of the Brescian school.  The most obvious thing about the fiddle, though, was its color.  Except for the strings, pegs, and bridge, it was a pale, semi-translucent milky hue, made of some well-polished plastic shot through with fine blue streaks.

“You may not believe it,” Dr. Poisson said, “but this is”—she emphasized the word to prevent any argument—“a 1709 Rogeri, the ‘Miskatonic.’”  She played on it a bit (with a wooden bow), and it sounded fantastic. 

I would no more ask a performer if I could borrow their fiddle for a moment than I would ask to borrow their spouse for a romantic tryst—but she insisted that both the Real Doctor and I play it, and we both found it to be an amazing instrument.  I’ve never played a Rogeri before, and maybe I didn’t then, but I did play an instrument that was fully the equal of the great old fiddles I’d sampled. 

While both the Real Doctor and I were dumbfoundedly playing her fiddle, Dr. Poisson was smiling like—well, the best reference I can think of is the Man in Black during the swordfight in The Princess Bride.  She opened up a double case, revealing another milky, blue-streaked fiddle.  “This is also the 1709 Rogeri,” she said, and urged us both to play it.  The feeling was uncanny.  It was like meeting a person so remarkable that they must be unique in all the world—then being introduced to their identical (and identically remarkable) twin.  “There are three more 1709 Rogeris back at Miskatonic that play exactly like these, and we’re making one every three weeks.”

Neither the Real Doctor nor I said much that was coherent, just a string of fragmentary questions, while Dr. Poisson beamed.  “This is actually the debut concert for this fiddle, which is odd given that it’s 1709.  It hasn’t been officially revealed, but I suppose now that you’ve seen it you’ll blog about it, and I want to make sure the story is straight.  First, you’ve got to give most of the credit to Dr. Barry O. Lodge of the Materials Science department at Miskatonic University.  I am, if you will, second to last author, and there are a dozen or more engineering students in front of me.”

“You know the Betts Project?” she asked.  (This is an effort by a well-known group of luthiers to use the latest technology to make a perfect replica of the Library of Congress’ 1704 “Betts” Stradivarius.  High-precision CT scans of the instrument are used to make a stereolithographic computer image of the violin, and this is fed into a CNC wood carving machine, producing a precise replica down to fractions of tenths of millimeters.  “That’s just cargo-cult lutherie—they think that if they replicate the form, they’ll replicate the magic, just like some stone-age Polynesians making detailed replicas of landing strips and hoping some airplanes full of goodies will arrive.  If they don’t capture that magic, it’s because they’ve failed to copy the form precisely enough.  Well, those cargo-cultists at Oberlin have made an agreeable violin, but it’s not the Betts.”

“See, they’ve got the shape as close as can be, but they don’t have the exact same piece of wood, with the exact same grain and imperfections and density and hardness variations, and they’re using some modern varnish that has its own differences in hardness and whatnot.  It’s the way the sound energy travels through the wood that makes the Betts what it is.  I’ve no doubt that the masters of Cremona were sensitive—maybe on some subconscious level, maybe as the result of years of experience with wood—to those subtleties, and this stupid Betts Project just ignores it.  I mean, they try to match the wood’s appearance, but really, they just have a Betts-shaped box, and it’s not like it’s any more affordable for a promising young student.

“So, Barry O. Lodge was working on extending the abilities of 3D printing, and he’d found that the community had basically run into the same wall as the Betts people—extraordinarily high fidelity replication of shape, complete ignorance of micro-scale variation in mechanical properties.  It’s funny, the Betts people got there reductively, by milling away wood, the 3DP people got there additively, by cementing together microscopic particles of resin.  Anyway, he has discovered a way to accurately measure mechanical properties like hardness, density, sound velocity, and so on at a 10^th of a millimeter scale.  Scanning takes forever, and the files are huge, but you really have the soul of the thing.

“If the soul is in the mechanical properties, I suppose,” interjected the Real Doctor, “but…”

Dr. Poisson pointed at the “Rogeri” in the Real Doctor’s hands. “That is an instrument,” she said, “a tool for making art.  Its soul is its unique voice, its ability to produce music, at which it has few equals.” 

I was examining the other “Rogeri.”  The purfling was a faint line of light grey around the edges.  Inside, there was a slight elevation where the label would be, as if a slip of parchment had been embalmed in resin.  The visual effect left me feeling very uneasy.  Wood was once alive, and bears time’s traces on a growing tree; the parchment in a fiddle is signed by the hand of the maker.  The visual impact of this instrument, which sounded so lovely and lively, gave me the creeps—a dead thing, mummified in plastic.  I handed it back to Dr. Poisson with some relief.  “So, from file to fiddle?” I asked.

“3D printing taken to a new level.  It’s all wrapped up in engineering and patents.  I don’t understand most of it, and what I might understand, I’m not allowed to know for legal reasons.  The chemistry is appealing, doping the resin with aligned, tuned nanotubes and other super-secret stuff to give it exactly the right mechanical properties on a micrometer-by-micrometer scale.  The resin is proprietary, but it’s the reason for the sickly color, and some of the dopants are blue, so that’s why the streakiness.  I really don’t love the visuals, but we can’t fix it yet.  The printer has replicated the mechanical properties of the varnish exactly, and adding any tint will screw up everything.  So I play with my eyes closed, and I’m playing the Rogeri.”  Which she did for us, again, and it still sounded wonderful—but I had to close my eyes. 

When she had stopped, I asked,  “Dr. Lodge wasn’t working on all this for lutherie, was he?”

“Goodness no,” she answered   "He’s an engineer, so he was doing this because it seemed hard but possible.  He presented a summary of this work at a symposium, and was looking for ideas.  He was thinking of tools and ornithopter drones, but I suggested fiddles would be a real test.”

The Real Doctor had been studying the “Rogeri” with her usual intensity, and didn’t break her gaze on the instrument when she asked, “The soundpost—is it of one piece with the instrument?  And, how does it sound side by side with the real Rogeri?”

Dr. Poisson smiled, and corrected the Real Doctor.  “This is the real Rogeri, and so is that one there.  It’s one piece, everything printed in one go but the fittings.

“Of course, the Rogeri wasn’t the first thing Barry and I tried.  We wanted to prove the concept on a more modest scale, so we chose a couple of modest student-level instruments—ones that had noticeable character, though not always good.  I played on them, day in and day out, for a couple of months.  The sacrifices we make for science!  I didn’t like them, but I could recognize each of them easily, even in a crowd.  Barry scanned and printed them, and we had the luthier string them up, and they were perfect clones—every annoying flaw and shortcoming, and even the few nice things, had been replicated.  Can you imagine what a boon it will be, when every student of the violin can play a really good fiddle—this, or the “Vieuxtemps” or the “Viotti” or their like—instead of fighting against some atrocious Chinese factory box?”

“Yeah, we’re facing the same thing right now with our nephews,” answered the Real Doctor.  She was starting to look a little worried, and looked at the “Rogeri” as if it might bite her.  “But how does this” she said, giving the grey-blue fiddle back to Dr. Poisson “sound side-by-side with the real Rogeri?”

Dr. Poisson’s dislike of the emphasis on “real” was visible, but, with a shrug, she put her fiddle back in the double case next to its twin.  “Well,” she said, “you can try for yourself.  We still haven’t told the regents of the university, who own the original.  I told them with perfect honesty that I am traveling with the ‘Miskatonic’ Rogeri.”  She rummaged through a travel case, and pulled out a Mason jar, three-quarters full of very fine, wood-brown dust, and offered it to the Real Doctor along with a bow.  “The scanning process is pretty hard on the original, but to me and Barry, that seems a fair price.”

Culture comes to the hinterlands (updated wth video)

One of the things that I have really missed since moving from Sacramento to Roseburg is a lively classical music scene.  The Real Doctor and I were spoilt rotten by the concert programming at UC Davis—the yearly series by the Alexander Quartet, the recitals by Garrick Ohlsson and Joshua Bell and the like.  The scene here is considerably colder, as might be expected in a town of 20,000.  Roseburg’s nearest neighbor with artistic aspirations is Eugene, over an hour away, and beyond that, there isn’t much less than three hours away.  Roseburg gets a yearly visit from the Eugene Symphony, which is the best orchestra in the southern Wilamette Valley.  There is a Community Concert series, whose offerings tend to be jazz or pop-classical.  There is the Umpqua Symphony Association, which focuses mainly on local talent for its handful of concerts each year.  If we went to every concert that could be filed under “classical music” this last year, we’d have seen less than 10 events, of wildly variable quality.

Given that, here’s a big shout-out to the proprietors of MarshAnne Landing Winery, who have seen fit to invite some classical musicians to have recitals in their tasting room/gallery.  The space can hold thirty people or so, making it quite cozy; the “stage” is nook with a decent-but-not-fabulous upright piano and room for a string quartet or a single very expressive violinist.  The concerts are the personal effort of the winery’s proprietors, so programming is necessarily modest.  Joshua Bell won’t be playing there, and the two recitals we’ve seen may be all for the season, but they’ve been thoroughly appreciated.  I don’t feel like being the music critic here; my attitude is more gratitude than judgement.  So, I’ll go on about some externalities.  

One program featured the violinist Lindsay Deutsch, playing a very casual show of Gershwin, Piazzola, Vivaldi, Brahms, and De Falla (the pianist played one of the Debussy Images while the violinist took a break).  The concert reflected the cultural stereotype that when you go out into the sticks, you have to play pop or light classical stuff.  It was pretty clear that there were a few audience members who would not be satisfied with any violin show that did not involve some of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons—and “Winter” was duly served up, to audible sighs of contentment.  The Brahms concerto was presented, but with apologies about its length and (to prevent boredom, I guess) as isolated movements separated by shorter, snappier pieces.  It was nice to get the Piazzola; it’s a little off the beaten path, and I really enjoyed the De Falla “Suite Popular.”

The concert by Chamber Music Amici of Eugene was a bit more “Serious”; a Mozart violin sonata, a cello sonata by the 20^th-century Portuguese composer Luis Costa, and a string quintet by Bruch that, while written in 1918, had only been published around 1980.  It was so nice to hear unfamiliar stuff presented straight up; the cello sonata was convincingly delivered and the Bruch made me go home and buy a recording.  The performances were good; the Amici have day jobs, and though most are connected with music, the violinist for the Mozart is a practicing physician. 

A couple of the instruments being played were of interest to the Real Doctor and me.  We are both a bit geeky about violins, and sometimes my attention to the music can be diverted by attention to the violin it’s played on.  In this case, the instruments were both inspired by Guarneri “del Gesu”, but took the inspiration in different directions.  The first, from across the room, really had the look of a del Gesu, but as it was played, it just didn’t seem to have the same tonal oomph.  It (and the player) was clearly aspiring to tonal richness, but it just was not really there.  The second instrument looked del-Gesu-ish, maybe early 1730’s, but just didn’t seem visually to be abused enough for a violin of that age.  However, its sound was rich—not as rich as the best del Gesu’s, but much more satisfying than the first violin.   

There are different schools of thought about what makes the difference between a good and a great violin.  Being who I am, I tend to think in graphs.  Here’s what some people like, which happens to be the first violin:

On any note, at any volume, the violin can only produce a limited number of interesting tones; however, it’s extremely uniform across the entire spectrum.  There’s also this:

Combine that with the fact that it tends to sound good under the ear of the person playing it, and you have what some people—including big names such as Hahn and Tetzlaff—find satisfying. It should also be noted that the brown line for your average student violin rarely gets as high as the brown line above. 

Here’s a rather different sort of violin, which happens to be the second violin, and also is more like the violins of Stradivari and del Gesu.

Few or no notes are wanting in tonal richness, and some regions are positively oozing with the stuff.  But,

It takes a lot of work to pull that stuff out of the violin.  It’s harder to play, and effectively use the entire endowment of the fiddle—but if the player has the skill and patience to exploit it, the results are amazing. 

The violin is a tool, a physical entity.  So what makes this difference?  The musicians giving these concerts were generous enough to let us take a closer look at their instruments and tell us about them. 

The first violin was a Vuillaume, made in the mid-1800’s.  Vuillaume enjoyed a reputation for making the finest copies of the finest violins, so it’s not too surprising that the fiddle visually announced itself as “del Gesu” from across the room.  However, close-up, a couple of details emerged.  One was that the arching was very low—if you looked at the fiddle side-on, it was several millimeters skinnier than a classic Cremonese instrument, which bulges out 15 or more mm front and back.  Another structural detail that affects sound was the absence of recurve as the arch blends into the side of the violin; if you were an ant, marching from the bridge to one of the sides, your trip would be downhill all the way, rather than pitching up for the last few paces.  These structural details—and lack of tonal richness--are pretty characteristic of Vuillaume.  Now, these are not horrible fiddles; I wouldn’t reject one as a gift, and one recently sold at auction for over $200,000.  They are just not my thing.

The second violin of note was an American instrument made by Carl Holzapfel in Philadelphia in the 1920’s, who was (it turns out) the great-grandfather of the violinist.  It had nice arching and nice recurve.  As I mentioned, it also had terrific sound; according to the violinist, it won a slew of awards and was the pride and joy of its luthier.  Holzapfel has some limited recognition as a good maker, and despite the obvious quality of the instrument, it will never sell for a tenth of what the Vuillaume will bring.  Go figure.

This raises a couple of questions.  The obvious one is why does sound mean so little in the sale price of a musical instrument—but the answer there is probably like the answer to why a 500-square foot apartment in downtown New York costs as much as our farm.  Another question, to which I don’t have a good start of an answer, is why Vuillaume made the copies he made in the way that he made them.  Was he aware of arching, and discounted it as meaningless?  Did it just not register in his eye?  I just don’t know.  To emphasize the point, I’ll close with photos of a different Vuillaume and a real Cremonese violin (alas, I can’t remember its identity; I think it’s a Petro Guarneri; the photos were taken during the 2012 Claremona workshop).  

And here, courtesy of Michael Darnton, is a video of a Brothers Amati violin that really illustrates the classic shape I'm talking about: Go watch this!

Like Clockwork

Anybody who has the slightest connection to the world of lutherie knows that every year, some engineer* in some corner of the world will discover the Secret of Stradivari--some odd treatment or technique that will allow any modern builder to replicate "the" sound** of the classic Cremonese instruments.  It's like those of us who follow biology know that every year--at least, if the popular press is to be believed--some researcher will discover "the" cure for cancer.  Really, if all the stories in the newspapers claiming that a cure for cancer is just around the corner were true, the dread disease would have been history long ago.

That last sentence should be in quotes--I lifted it verbatim from an article in this week's Economist that discusses a paper about why science journalism sucks with such regularity.  The paper*** focuses on the ten journal articles about ADHD that garnered the most attention from the popular media, and what happens after the big splash.  It concludes that the findings in each of the "top ten" are novel, generate testable hypotheses, and in eight out of ten cases, are unsupported by subsequent research. The paper refrains from slamming the media, but points out that the popular press is easily impressed by high-impact journals, top-tier universities, and seems unwilling to follow up and look for confirmation of splashy results. 

The Economist cops to some blame for this state of affairs, but also apportions some blame to the scientists themselves, because the follow-up articles don't make it into the same high-impact journals.  (Nobody mentions one of my least favorite things, the University Press Release, which is often horrible and swallowed whole by the media.)  So, it admonishes itself, and then lets itself off the hook.

And, on the very same page, there is this article: "Magic Mushrooms--Violins constructed from infected wood sound like those of Stradivari," about how some engineer in Switzerland has discovered the Secret of Stradivari...



*I don't know why, but it's practically always an engineer

**a bogus goal in itself; for one thing, there is no unified sound of Cremona, or even of any single maker, and for another, one of the things that makes these fiddles so prized is their protean sound.

***Gonon F, Konsman J-P, Cohen D, Boraud T (2012) Why Most Biomedical Findings Echoed by Newspapers Turn Out to be False: The Case of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. PLoS ONE 7(9): e44275. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0044275.  It's PLOS, so it's open access, and it's an amusing paper, so go read it.  

 

Gluing up

Sheesh--I still haven't finished posting all the work I did at the violin workshop, and I still haven't been able to do any violin work here in Roseburg. Things are starting to settle somewhat, so hopefully I can fix both of those issues.

Let's see, I left off with a fingerboard that had been planed flat on one side and curved appropriately on the other side. That meant it was time to glue it onto the neck, and here's one of the places where the Book said to do it one way and Michael said to do it another. Being as how Michael was there and the authors of the book were not, I went with Michael.

When you attach the neck to the body, it's really useful to have the fingerboard in place. Otherwise, it's very easy to get the neck slightly skewed along one of several axes. On the other hand, if you want to do a perfect job of varnishing the body, it's annoying to have the fingerboard in the way. Also, if you want to have your fiddle catch some sun while the varnish cures, the fingerboard will absorb a lot of heat and warp. So, the Book recommends just using a dab of glue to attach the fingerboard. Once everything is all assembled and ready to varnish, you pop the fingerboard off; then, varnishing completed, you reattach the fingerboard with a full dose of glue.

Bosh, sez Michael. (OK, he didn't say "Bosh," but words to that effect.) What did the old guys do? They glued the fingerboard on, then they varnished the fiddle. You can see it when you look at their work. It's quicker and easier, and the people who check the varnish under the fingerboard are the ones who look for dust behind your oven.

So, there it is, setting with a bunch of spring clamps.

While that was in progress, it was also time to glue the top onto the body. That was heaps of no fun. Hide glue sets very quickly, and I did not have the sang-froid to do it all at once. So, a dab here, some clamps, pry open a little bit, a dab more, re-clamp, and so on all the way around. It turned out OK, as far as I can tell--no visible gaps or buzzes. Yet.

Too many tools

The Real Doctor and I have been involved in this violin-building project for a couple of years now. I now have a violin just about "in the white"--that is, pretty much ready to varnish and set up. The Real Doctor, over a year ago, purchased a violin in the white, varnished it and set it up. So, between the two of us, we have done everything required to go from wood to fiddle.

When my friend Dave found out about our efforts, he noted that lutherie, like any hobby, provides an excellent opportunity to buy many neat and nifty tools. This has been the case. Though we have borrowed a few tools, we've largely gotten this far with tools we've bought. Of course, everybody recommends this or that specific tool for the job, and since we're both complete noobs, we have to try them out. The result is something like our gouge collection:
You need a broad gouge for roughing out plates. Our best book, Courtenall and Johnson, says get a gouge like the one at top right. Our guru, Michael, says that's ridiculous, get one like the one immediately to its left. The amazing Ray Lee says psssssst, try this one out--so we get the last one with a handle on the top left. A few other gouges are needed, but probably not as many as we have. There's a lot of redundancy there, and we just have to see what works best--Stubai? Power Grip? Willow? Swiss steel, English, or Japanese? Will I like the same thing the Real Doctor does?

We have a similar situation with knives, with files and rasps, with planes (we have a box full of Stanley #102 planes bought on e-bay, in an effort to find a couple of good ones), finger plane blades, and so on.

Eventually, I hope, this will settle out. Some of the stuff will go back to e-bay, or somewhere where I don't have to worry about it. The goal is to be like Mike (or Stradivari) and just use a handful of tools. But for now, I hope we are nearing the top of this curve:

Working on the fingerboard

The scroll being pretty much done, it was time to do the fingerboard. First, it's necessary to make the back of the fingerboard perfectly* flat.

This was one of those things (like fitting a bass bar, shaping a corner, roughing out a top, building the entire violin) that took me half a day, but takes Michael Darnton about a minute. I'd put the fingerboard down on a sheet of glass and try to find where it was rocking, and take away a tiny smidge of wood. I'd try it again on the glass, and it would still rock just as much but in a different direction, and so I'd plane off another smidge of wood...and so on for an entire morning. Eventually, it got to the point where I was just pressing the fingerboard down onto the glass so hard that it flattened out, but this succeeded only in deceiving myself.

Eventually, I took the fingerboard to Michael. He pointed out my self-deception, rocked the piece of wood on the glass, whipped out his trusty Stanley 102, and made a half dozen alarmingly decisive strokes, and got the wood perfectly flat.
I'm not really frustrated by this. Making a violin is a process of excavating a delicate object from a block of wood. It's like excavating a delicate fossil from a matrix of rock. If you don't know the rock and you're not too handy with the tools, you would go as slowly as possible, and patiently remove matrix with dental picks and brushes. This takes a long time. If you're really the master of the rock and the tools, you have the skill to remove almost all of the matrix with dynamite, and you can get rid of the last millimeters with the dental pick and brush.

Now, I'm scared of using the big knife and the big planes for removing all but the last millimeter, just like I'd be scared of using dynamite to remove all but the last millimeter of limestone from a fossil. So I use the big knife, then the smaller knife, then the tiny knife, then the thumb plane, then the scraper, then maybe sandpaper. It takes me forever. But, Michael has practiced this for a long time and he knows how these things behave. So, he sizes up the situation, and knows exactly where to put the big knife--and boom!--out comes a violin from its woody matrix. He's paid his dues. Me, I need to practice.

*Once the bottom is flat, a gentle stroke with a plane puts a very slight concavity into the bottom--this helps with the gluing.

A similar process has to happen with the top of the fingerboard. However, instead of being flat, the top has to have a precise curve. We have a template for this.

I've seen a stiff steel scraper made that has this exact curve, and I think I may do this. It was a pain in the hiney to do with a plane. It could be worse, of course--the Amazing Ray Lee started with a big billet of ebony rather than a pre-shaped fingerboard blank.

Oh, and all this work planing a fingerboard? It makes a lot of ebony curls--so, meet Ebonezer.

Hollowing out the pegbox

Once the scroll is in decent shape, the next task is to dig out the pegbox. This is one part of the violin that I find unsatisfying. The scroll, the f-holes, the bouts--all have a nice balance of aesthetic and functional. Even the pegs can be pretty. But the pegbox is about as beautiful as the word sounds. None of the curves or clean lines of the rest of the instrument, just a cramped and harshly rectilinear box with a tangle of pegs and string ends.

From the player’s point of view, the pegbox is annoyingly small. It’s tricky to get a fresh string into one of the pegs and have it stay in while it gets wound up. I often use a hemostat because my fingers are just too clumsy. As a player, I’d love a much bigger area there to work with.

The pegbox was also annoying to me as a maker. It’s not too problematic to chisel out most of the cavity, but getting a nice clean cut near the scroll is a pain.

Knowing that I’ll be putting strings in there, I tried to make it nice and roomy—I was advised by one source to leave at least 4 mm around each peg. Another jokingly said to make the back of the pegbox so thin that it was transparent. These ended up being about the same, an end I reached pretty much by accident.

I did not enjoy seeing that!

Sharpening up the scroll...and sharpening

Once the scroll is roughed out, there's a lot of work to tidy it up. One of the things that really helps bring it into focus is putting a chamfer on all the edges--that little bevel between planes. For some reason, it really makes it easier to see everything that the scroll is doing, and how the spiral sort of "moves." Another thing that sharpens it up is putting the fluting into the scroll--the parallel gouges that run the length of the scroll. Both of these are stylistic elements that different makers do to different extents, and some barely do at all. Additionally, in a really old scroll, they may be nearly worn away. However, in this fresh scroll, they make the pattern really stand out more sharply.
Speaking of sharp, there seems to be a universal phenomenon among wood craftspeople. Luthiers are especially fond of scary sharp tools, so everybody at the workshop spent a lot of time at the sharpening station--a hand cranked grinding wheel, a honing stone, and a strop. And it seems that everybody tested their blades in the same way: shave some hairs off of a convenient forearm. That's my left arm on the bottom, below my right arm--the picture shows how I've now got a bald patch above my left wrist.

One of the workshop participants is a luthier by trade, but was introduced to some wood artisans from another country. They had no common language, but when the foreigner saw my classmate's forearm, he laughed. He rolled back his left shirtsleeve, to reveal an identical bald patch right above his wrist. No common tongue, perhaps, but definitely a common forearm!

Practice makes better

There's only so much work you can do on the scroll with a saw. Eventually, the blades have to come out, and if you're as amateurish as I am, they come out very timidly. A little nibble here, a nick there. This is one of the differences between a tyro and a pro. Even if they produce something that is nearly the same, the beginner does it in a thousand little pixelated nibbles, while the experienced hand does it in a fluid stroke. Consider a couple of days work for me:
As far as possible with the saw, then patiently nibbling with the chisel and knife.Timidly approaching the "eye" with a delicate knife and a gouge.
Putting a very timid chamfer on the edges--that bevel that goes around the whole curve, and really sharpens everything up. I would put a little bit on, and Michael Darnton (the teacher) would tell me to make it more so. Over and over again, a contest between my timidity and his patience.
A bit of comparison with the model, and starting to rough out the heel. It doesn't closely resemble the Stainer, but it's not a classical Cremonese scroll either. What is it, exactly? Stay tuned...

So, all that was two nervous days of work for me. An experienced maker at the workshop, Ray Lee, did all that in one morning, and his flows more nicely. I must practice a bit more.

Resuming the violin project (ii)

As noted, I pretty much left off violin construction at the end of last year's workshop. This was the status quo:
The back was glued to the sides, and the top was finished but not attached. The neck and scroll existed only as a cut-out blank, fresh from the band saw and drill press.

The main agenda for me in Claremona this year was the scroll. It's buried somewhere in that lump of wood, and my job was to dig it out.

Resuming the violin project

Life has clearly not been sufficiently complicated recently. So in addition to finishing an extremely busy academic year, fixing and selling the house, moving to Oregon, and trying to buy a house in Oregon, I've spent the last two weeks at the Southern California Violin Making Workshop in Claremont. This ended up being quite the tonic. Neither the Real Doctor nor I had done anything on our respective violins since, oh, July or August of last year, and both of us had been pedal to the metal at work. So, shifting gears from work to lutherie was pretty crunchy and took a couple of days. The intense and complete refocus really cleared my mind.

The Real Doctor had a head start, as I had to miss the first week of the violin building class for the last week of my biology class. Of course, everything in Sacramento took longer than expected, so I didn't get to LA until late at night. This meant driving past the central valley feedlots at dusk--peak bug time, as our car's bumper will attest:After a brief stop at the parents', it was off to "Claremona" (i.e. Cremona in Claremont) and the workshop. The Real Doctor sent me this picture to let me know what I was missing.
The picture made me want to get there sooner. I count everybody there as a friend.

Tools

There’s a definite overlap between the worlds of molecular biology and lutherie, and that has to do with tools—and no, it’s not that a luthier’s knives are sharp enough to reliably cut DNA. One of the frustrations of molecular biology is the amount of time required for tool building. Your observations give you a brilliant idea, but testing that idea requires a few things—you’ll probably need to build a couple of new plasmids, which takes a few days of cutting and pasting DNA; the result must be verified, which takes a couple more days; you need to modify a few bacterial cells or cell lines, which can take days or weeks; you may need to get some new hardware for testing, or new enzymes, or learn new techniques, or borrow them from another lab—and so on. It all adds up, so that it seems as if you spend less time doing science than you do building the tools to do it. There were times at the violin-building workshop when I felt the same way, as an afternoon of tool-building gave me an hour of woodwork.

The experienced luthier has a selection of tools that he or she knows well—in many cases, the luthier made the tools, shaping them to specific tasks. The tools are kept sharp, and experience and practice have made the luthier adept at sharpening them. A beginning luthier faces a double frustration. My beginner’s toolkit is in a constant state of flux since everyone swears a different set of tools is perfect. Myself, I spend a lot of time trying to accomplish a specific task and cycling through this gouge and that plane until I get the right thing; clearly, some selection must happen. Worse, new tools are never usable “out of the box.” Planes must have their soles flattened, and their blades shaped and ground; a new block plane took me an entire day to make ready for use. Gouges, which are bought with a straight edge, need to be rounded; if the tool is made of good hard steel, then this can take me most of a morning—and it will still require sharpening. And knives? We bought a bunch—but there’s a problem.

The frugal luthier doesn’t buy many knives. They may be made of dubious steel, and cost a lot, and have uncomfortable handles. I now know that the trick is to buy a Starrett “Red Stripe” brand power hacksaw blade for twenty bucks. (Before this class, I was serenely unaware of power hacksaws. They look like so:

And I can only imagine what a nightmare they are at work.) The blade is monstrous, almost two inches wide, a tenth of an inch thick, and twenty inches long. However, it is made through and through of top quality high-speed steel, as hard as you can get and capable of holding an edge for darn near ever. The big blade can be sliced up with a cutaway wheel into blanks for smaller blades—a noisy, time consuming process that produces so much iron dust that your snot turns black. Rather than cut all the way through, which takes the patience of Job, you cut halfway and then break the steel, which is hard but brittle--occasionally, as happened here, one of the blanks you hoped for snaps in half.

The blanks can be roughly shaped on a belt sander or high speed wheel (huge thanks to Jim!), but it’s necessary to guard against overheating the steel. So, the finer shaping that gives you a finished blade must be done on a low-speed wheel. The same hardness that makes this steel so good for a blade makes it very hard to shape, so it took me an entire afternoon of the constant rrrr-rrrrr-rrrrr-rrrrr-rrrrr of the hand wheel to produce a couple of blades. This gives you a lot of time to think--about how much I'd rather do the “real” work of violin-building, about how much worse the process would be if I lived in 17th century Cremona, about how annoying the minimalist music I was making must be for everybody else in the room. Eventually, though, you get a blade:

I still have to make the handle--another afternoon of toolbuilding!

As with most things, practice makes better. I should spend a bunch of time just sharpening all the tools we’ve bought, and "scary sharp" should become routine rather than a happy accident. But, just like lab work, if you want the exact right tool, you have to make it yourself. So, I have another Starrett blade awaiting my attention.

Why build violins (IV)

I’ll start with this. It’s timely, as the obit for the woman in the photo was published today, and there is a connection with building violins.

I don’t know Doc well enough to give you the whole story, but he seems like a guy who has put in some effort and had some luck. Life has rewarded him with enough happiness that he can share it with others. Doc’s a pretty good amateur violinist, and grew up around violins and violin makers. At a point in their careers where they could make such investments, Doc and his friend David Fulton purchased some fine violins. Doc ended up with a very good Stradivarius (the Leonore Jackson) and a Guraneri Del Gesu and a case full of great bows.

If you had a garage with a Rolls Royce and a Lamborghini in it, what would compel you to try to make your own car from scratch? There is no good reason. So, you’d have to have a bad reason. From eating fifty hard-boiled eggs to riding down a steep hill in a shopping cart, there is no worse reason to do anything than a dare (well, there’s one worse reason, but we’ll get to that). What I gather is that, basically, Doc’s violin-building friends challenged him to build a fiddle. So he did. It’s really good and he’s justifiably proud of it. He’s honest about how it was made: “Come to this workshop, do exactly every single thing that Michael Darnton tells you to do, and you will end up with this.” Now Doc is working on his second violin. He’s still learning how to do it, functioning somewhat more on his own and less as a strictly controlled automaton, and enjoying the heck out of it.

I mentioned that there is a worse reason than a dare to do something foolish, and that’s the reason P.T. is building a violin. P.T. is a slightly older friend of Doc’s. They live near each other, go on hikes together and such. Before he retired he worked as a teacher of visual arts in many media—wood, animation, you name it. He’s good with his hands. His buddy, Doc, was building a violin, so for the worst of reasons, peer pressure, P.T. began building a violin. Mind you, P.T. had never played violin and didn’t know much about violins, and it’s crazily difficult to build anything if you don’t have clear picture of what you’re aiming for. So, it has come along slowly with a few goofs along the way, but it’s very nearly done. Of course, P.T. is already thinking about the next one. (Come to think of it, between a peer pressure and a dare there’s not much difference—it’s really only whether or not you have company as you go jumping off the bridge.)

Why the epic Times Square VJ-Day smooch? P.T. was there, on leave from his hospital ship which was berthed in New York getting fitted to go out to the Pacific Theater and the invasion of Japan. As he told me (his voice reminds me of a slightly less exuberant Joe Carcione), “Dat coulda been me in that picture. It was crazy. So happy”

Why build violins (III)

For this one, I'll defer to Stanley Potts*. Go and read, now.

I can't say that this is the reason I'm working on my Stainer model. My family is generally unsentimental to a point that might appear callous to outsiders. However, I just found out that my Aunt L. died earlier this week. I wasn't especially close to her, but I find myself seeing a parallel to her in the Stainer--a bit old fashioned and formal, precise, polite, and nice. She had a good, full life, and I hope that this fiddle can be as good to its players as she was to her family and friends.

I left the violin workshop this morning, and the quarter starts at full speed on Monday. I will be going from being a student at maximum intensity to being a teacher at maximum intensity. I still have a lot in mind from the workshop, and I'm hoping that the rush of summer sessions will not crowd out the memories. While progress on the violin will undoubtedly slow, I will keep posting--this record has still not caught up with current events.

*A regular contributor to the Strad. He is a curmudgeonly, semi-retired luthier with a fondness for Stradivari, Gilbert & Sullivan, and single-malt Scotch. Toby is is former assistant, and current boss; Bianca is an apprentice, and like Toby, an obsessive fan of Guarneri del Gesu.

Why build violins (II)

The violin is loaded with mystique. If you want to write a romance, you’ll get more readers with “The Red Violin” than with “The Red Trombone.” It’s understandable, then, why people can be seduced or possessed by violins. This seems to have happened to more than one participant in the Southern California Violin Builders’ Workshop. L., who had no musical background, had an intensely vivid dream in which she could play the violin. She started taking lessons, and before long became seized by the idea of building a fiddle. J also had an epiphany. Having raised and homeschooled her children, she was at a point where she was at a loss for what to do—she didn’t call it a midlife crisis, but it sounded sort of like Dante’s mezzo cammin. One day she visited a luthier’s shop, and it just hit her that this is what she must do. For her, the atmosphere of the shop combined with the aura of the product proved overwhelming.

L. and J. are here at the workshop. L. is in a constant state of amazement; before her dream, she knew little of tools and woodworking, let alone violin building. She’s definitely happy on her quest, though, moving slowly, cheerfully receiving lots of help, and making great strides. J. is working on her eighth violin. She’s still learning, but works in a professional manner (though she occasionally gets vocally frustrated with a recalcitrant piece of wood).

Passion will take you odd and interesting places. When it comes as a bolt from the blue, it can make your life jump sideways. I’d be willing to bet that before their epiphanies, both L. and J. had absolutely no idea where they would be now; I also think that they’re pretty happy with it. I know that when I met the love of my life, things moved in different and unexpected directions—heck, here I am building a violin, and that certainly wasn’t in the long-term vision statement back in 1990. But, I’m happy with it.