September 2008
Hahahaha!
September 17, 2008 10:46
I have just heard my favorite story. No really... the absolute tops, the ultimate anecdote!
'I thought I had seen it all until a customer walked into the shop with a violin packed with cooked rice. Someone told him to put rice in the instrument to clean it. Guess they forgot to tell him... dry rice... right out out of the bag.'
Thank you, Giovanni Gammuto, for dropping my jaw!
The rice trick is also a lovely non-invasive way to measure the resonant space inside an instrument. You don't have to pop the top off, you fill the box with rice kernels through the ff holes and then measure how much fit in.
Many makers swear by the air capacity of an instrument. Some vary their rib and arch heights so that the same overall number is always reached. An average of Golden period instruments' combined arch and rib heights is usually the ruler used.
Cooked rice! Oh, me, oh my...
3 replies
Repair as Destruction
September 12, 2008 18:02
Next time you have an older instrument in your hands (not that newer fiddles are pristine), look around the C bouts and corners for little halfmoon dark indentations. No, they're not gouge toolmarks, left by some maker in his lamplit shop in Parma.
A repairman over-tightened his clamps when he put the top back on. Usually such dents can be steamed or swelled out. The survivors attest to how often it happens in a violin's life.
Blown off buttons, pinhole burns INSIDE the box from luthiers smoking as they worked, whole instruments stripped of varnish and rebrushed to match the touchup from a shaky hand.
And OH GOD the white glue, the titebond and carpenter glue well-meaning jerks use to 'repair' violins. Sorry-
I saw a bassbar on a beautiful fiddle today, glued in with titebond and clamped so hard to fix the bad fit that the top was crushed where each clamp foot sat. It made me upset.
There is an inherent snottiness in this business- players and dealers and teachers and makers all together! I would like to tear it down, not perpetuate it, but damnit, don't touch a single blessed violin unless you know more about it than a guitar. Here's a more workable maxim- If you're not willing to buy the Weisshaar book and call it gospel, don't 'fix' that fiddle!
It's not just the travesty of a job poorly done. A luthier does more damage to a violin in a day than a player does in a year. Well, I know a few bar musicians who trash that idea.
Here- to temper my tantrum, I'll tell you all about the Anchor Steam incident at Cafe Amsterdam, Marin County CA in 2001. One whole pitcher of the Bay's best beer tipped over and filled my grandfather's 1912 Heberlein almost miraculously, sluicing in through the ff holes in a tasty, foamy mess.
I guess somewhere in the great beyond, Gramps was thirsty.
Doublepost
September 11, 2008 10:06Apparently I am also Conrad Jacoby, itinerate Virginian! Thank you for your help, Laurie, the posting works fine now.
Spiral Bushing!
September 11, 2008 10:03
Learned a fun trick to resize a blown-out or over-reamed peghole yesterday. Often such a hole is straight bushed, meaning you carve soft maple to a taper that matches the peg and push it through, carving away all but that which sits within the pegbox walls. Then you redrill the hole through the fresh wood plugs and start reaming again.
The spiral bushing was much more fun.
A 2 or 3 mm shaving is taken off of soft maple, or poplar, which was easier to handle, soaked, and then rolled like a cigarette around a taper, full of glue. Then you press this curled up wonder through the peghole and expand it turn by turn, letting it dry every few minutes before twisting it tighter.
The result- less original wood taken away, a peg which was just a touch too far in is adjusted, and the pegbox is actually strengthened against possible breaks (especially at the A peg, as I'm sure you've seen). The grain of the shaving points out from the center of the new bushing in a spiral, pressing against the pegbox wall in all directions.
But the glue gets every damn place, let me tell you.
Favorite Bach- The Varnish Rub
September 4, 2008 13:29
Henryk Szeryng! As I understand it, this man was something close to Hitler on a personal level (but then again, Hitler may have been a touch sweeter). Charles Woolf told me he once had a student who introduced herself to Szeryng after a concert, and although she would not repeat what it was he said to her, she turned red and shook slightly at even a mention of his name. Whee!
Evil aside, I have rediscovered his recorded solo Bach, and find it (perhaps) better than Milstein's. I'll have to exclude that final Nate recording. The Chacconne on the final recording is epic. Szeryng crunches and soars through my favorite pieces, and leaves me thinking about those hidden moving lines in new ways. Highly recommended.
I am finishing the outlines on a Viotti model Strad at home right now, and ruminating on the varnish, and the complex care given to it in literature and discussion. The varnish in cathedrals and on furniture from the same era shows the same characteristics, and its widely held that an oil varnish would have been bought from the local apothecary, and fiddled with to taste.
That's the rub of reverse engineering: analyzation leads to ridiculously complex methods. These makers were buying varnish, throwing a little pigment or earth in, and painting the violins. 1000 instruments came out of Strad's shop in his lifetime. There is no way he was cooking rosinates for a month at a time, and applying gypsum and horse urine and the like at careful intervals.
The look is paramount. But the method should be repeatable, and functional.
I love this work, as terrifyingly hard as it is. My brain is stirred up every time I sit down to something I can't grasp yet.
Perhaps A Lighter Touch
September 1, 2008 11:18
I find, in rereading my post myself, that I didn't give proper care to my argument. I didn't mean to deride the Strads I've played. Nothing, and I mean, nothing, has compared to the Firebird, or hearing the Betts, the Glennie. I wish I had been able to play the Betts, but the caretaker at the Library of Congress was understandably nervous.
There is no comparison to the greats. What I meant was that those midlevel pro instruments- the neapolitans, the firenze late 1700's, the gorgeous brutes that Sanctu Seraphim and the Gaglianos made are more name brand than gold at this point.
There ARE instruments that hold up to Strads made in the last 30 years. I played a violin a few weeks ago that made my heart drop out. Also- acceding your points, I am not a worldclass player, and my touch is NOT deft enough to drag all that a Strad has to offer out.
I'll keep my opinion of the new Italians as a whole. I don't care for the light varnish, the thick tops or the thin set-up. They aren't to my taste.
Hope all is well with you, and that fine instruments keep finding you,
Chris
More entries: August 2008
Violinist.com is made possible by...
Dimitri Musafia, Master Maker of Violin and Viola Cases
International Violin Competition of Indianapolis
Violinist.com Holiday Gift Guide
Johnson String Instrument/Carriage House Violins
Subscribe
Laurie's Books
Discover the best of Violinist.com in these collections of editor Laurie Niles' exclusive interviews.
Violinist.com Interviews Volume 1, with introduction by Hilary Hahn
Violinist.com Interviews Volume 2, with introduction by Rachel Barton Pine