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Yakov Freidin: Secrets of Old Violins

Published: April 29, 2016

Headings:

Interesting history

Art

Quite a few instruments of Antonio Stradivari, the most famous violin maker, have survived to this day. About 600 of his violins are officially known, and who knows how many survived and those that were not included in the registers? A dozen violas and about 60 cellos, made by the same master, have also survived. One of his violins, known as The Lady Blunt, sold at auction five years ago for nearly $16 million. But if you go to any music store, you can buy a decent student violin for one thousand or even cheaper. Is she ten thousand times worse than that Strahd? Of course not. And how can this be measured? I was curious to understand why violins and cellos, made about 300 years ago in the provincial Italian town of Cremona, are valued so highly?

Money does not always serve as a measure of quality and rather reflects the emotional value of things. The price of an old musical instrument depends on three factors: the name of the master, the condition (whether there are any breakdowns or repairs) and the quality of the sound. Stradivari was the most famous master of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, but there were other greats of that time - Bergonzi, a student of Stradivari, Guarneri del Gesu (that is, from the Jesuits), Guadanini, and a number of other masters. The founder of the Cremonese school was Andrea Amati, whose descendants also made wonderful violins. The name of the master is the first thing that determines the price. What about the sound? Is he really so unsurpassed with those violins? That's what we'll talk about.

The violin in its current form was invented at the peak of the Italian Renaissance, that is, somewhere around 1500, no one knows for sure - this process was gradual. One of the paintings from the early 16th century depicted an angel playing the violin. This is probably the very first evidence that the violin already existed then, although its form is somewhat different from that of later ones. And the picture also hints that she had an angelic sound. If you think about it, the violin is the only instrument that has been in constant use for centuries. Any other ancient instrument, say, a hammer, compasses, spyglass or scissors, can only be found in a museum, but not in a workplace. But the violin, that is, an instrument for producing sound, has been serving for hundreds of years and is not getting worse. Moreover, over the centuries, its design and manufacturing methods have not changed much. That's engineering excellence!

In the old days, violins were made by artisans called luthiers, that is, those who had previously made lutes - even older stringed instruments. In Italy, the luthiers were not highly respected, they were considered even lower than carpenters - those useful objects were still planed, and not some kind of spillikins. It's funny, but even in modern Cremona, violin makers, of whom there are about 300 people, are now called disrespectfully - luthiers. In truth, some of them should not be respected, as they will introduce themselves, to put it mildly, roguely. Knowing that the word "Cremona", the city of ancient violin makers, has a magical effect, especially on buyers from Asia, they do this. Such a cunning luthier buys in China a factory-made wooden violin blank for, say, $100, trims it a little, covers it with a bright varnish, sticks a “Made in Cremona” label and sells it to some simpleton for $10,000, or even more. This is such a crazy business.

So, what does the sound quality depend on? From a technical point of view, a violin is a wooden box that, like a cave that creates an echo, amplifies the strength of the sound waves produced by the vibrating strings. When the hair of the bow scrapes the string, it vibrates depending on its thickness, length and tension. The hair on the bow is made from a ponytail, as it is very rough and the strings vibrate more strongly from contact with it. The amplified sound from the violin comes out after two f -shaped slots, which are called "efs".

If you stretch a string over, say, a metal or plastic rod and place a microphone nearby, the sound can be amplified electrically. From the bow, the string will vibrate not only at one, the main frequency, but also at many side frequencies, called overtones. But they are weak and almost inaudible, and therefore the sound from the string, directly or through a microphone, will be poor and uninteresting. But in a wooden violin, an uneven amplification of frequencies occurs, some overtones are amplified more strongly, some are weaker, and through the ffs the sound comes out already changed, “colored”, with many audible overtones. This gives it beauty and strength. Interestingly, the sound of the violin, which is closest to the timbre of the human voice, seems the most beautiful to the ear. Therefore, the expression "the violin sings" is not an empty phrase.

For the violin to sing like a man, the old masters, especially Andrea Amati, experimented with the shape of the instrument for a long time and gradually settled on the one we know. The shape is therefore so twisted, so that different frequencies have where to resonate in the best way. To date, many famous instruments have been measured and studied in the most accurate way. Experts know about them all sizes, and therefore there are many copies of famous violins. However, simple copying of shapes and sizes creates only a mediocre sounding instrument, very far from the original. So it's something else. And what remains? Only two things - wood and varnish.

The body of the violin is made from the most common types of wood: the back (bottom) of maple, and the front (top) and sides of pine or spruce. Sometimes another tree is used. The beauty of sound is a subjective thing and there is no scientific measure for it. In addition, a lot depends on the person who plays the violin. Unlike the piano, where the sound is discrete (digital) and the timbre depends only on which key to press, the violin is an “analog” instrument, that is, a continuous transition from one tone to another. When playing the piano, the pianist controls only the strength and duration of the sound of each key - the rest is done by the mechanism. There is no mechanism for extracting sound, as in the piano, in the violin. And so the sound is not made by the violin itself, but by the combination of the violin, the bow and the hands of the musician. Here is an interesting comment. Some 35 years ago, my wife's violin was stolen. It was a good mid 19th Italian instrumentcentury. The wife lay on the couch and suffered, and her colleague, the wonderful violinist Albert Markov, consoled: “There is nothing to roar about because of the piece of wood. Music is not made by the violin, but by the musician.” Of course, he twitched, but there was a lot of truth in his words. Therefore, when comparing different violins, it is important that they are played by the same violinist and the same music. Sometimes such competitions are arranged and the first places in terms of sound are often taken not by ancient, but by modern instruments. Therefore, the current masters also have their own secrets of how to achieve a beautiful and strong sound.

But still, why do the violins of the late 17th and first half of the 18th century sound so much better than those that followed them? Why did the sound quality suddenly drop? Does this mean the secret has been lost? And was there a secret? Or maybe something has changed that the Luthiers themselves did not even know about?

-- -- --

Let's go back to the tree. Some modern masters believe that when the violin is "young" it does not sound so good, but over the centuries the structure of wood fibers somehow changes, and like old wine, the violin began to sound better. These craftsmen buy old wood (200-400 years old), for example, from the rafters of medieval houses when they are repaired or rebuilt. Then they make violins from this wood, believing that the wood has already grown old and the violins will sound better. It doesn't always help. Looks like the secret is not the age of the tree.

Others believe that the main thing is not whether the wood is old, but in its treatment with chemical compositions and the properties of the varnish with which the violin is coated. Nowadays, every violin maker brews his own varnish and keeps his recipe in the strictest confidence, believing that it is the varnish that determines the sound, and therefore the quality of the instrument.

The violin has one more strange property - in order for it to sound good, it must be constantly played. A violin that has been lying idle for years and is silent, as it were, becomes numb and then it will sound much worse. This is why old instruments from museums and collections are loaned to good violinists to be constantly played and kept alive. What is the reason for this - no one knows, but it can be assumed that if the tree does not vibrate for a long time, some irreversible changes occur in its structure that worsen the acoustic properties. Therefore, the more often you play the violin, the better it will sound.

One day, professor of biochemistry from A&M University in Texas, J. Nagyvary, came up with an unusual hobby - he decided to make violins. Since he was not a luthier, but a scientist, he conducted many experiments, trying to find the best tree, but he did not achieve success. Studying the history of northern Italy, he found that in the Middle Ages in Venice, only licensed lumberjacks were allowed to cut trees. They dumped logs into rivers and floated them into the Venetian lagoon to sell to shipbuilders. They selected the best logs for themselves, and what was left, they sold to furniture makers, and only then to luthiers in Cremona. Until the turn came, the tree was soaked in Venetian water for weeks, or even months. A Texas biochemist tested the chemical composition of wood from old violins and found an unusually high content of minerals such as copper, aluminum, sodium, potassium, and especially calcium and magnesium salts. He realized that the tree was wet and soaked in the dirty waters of the lagoon, where the city sewer drained in those years, and decided to imitate this in his laboratory. I hung an announcement at the university asking me to donate urine for violin research. Then he added urine to water and soaked the bars in such a brine, and then dried them. Minerals, having impregnated the wood, crystallized during drying and increased its density, which is important for better vibration. The denser the wood, the more the violin box amplifies the sound. However, he did not make a big discovery here - and before him, many luthiers soaked wood to protect against mold and insects - sometimes in running water, but more often in different solutions, for example, in urea or borax. The process was called "ponding". It helped - the bugs died, and the sound got better.

Nagyvari also found out that in the old days the Luthiers themselves did not make violin lacquer, but bought it from the same alchemists as furniture makers. In old books, he found recipes for furniture varnishes. It turned out that they added glass powder, amber, ox bile, extracts from the juices of fruit trees and many other ingredients for shine, but there were no oils there. Oil-free varnish does not soak into the wood, but remains on its very surface, like skin, allowing the wood to vibrate freely. Nagyvari made a number of violins and cellos from his stained wood and lacquer. According to major musicians, his instruments produce a wonderful sound. In laboratory comparisons, the overtones of his violins were close to those of Stradivarius. But the comparison is not a proof, and therefore there is no complete certainty that this is the secret of the old Cremonese masters.

Another theory has come up recently. Its authors are a specialist in annual wood rings G. Grissino-Meyer from the University of Tennessee and a climatologist L. Barkle from Columbia University. They found that in a cold climate, the tree grows more slowly, the annual rings in them form closer to each other, and therefore the wood is denser. Moreover, it was found that in the best old violins, the density of the wood almost did not change along the entire top soundboard. In other words, it is not the density itself, but its uniformity that gives the most beautiful sound. And the density uniformity is higher where the annual rings are closer to each other.

This is what happened in Europe in those early days. From about 1400 to the mid-1800s, there was a severe cooling known as the Little Ice Age. There are several reasons for this - a decrease in solar activity, a change in the course of the Gulf Stream, a grandiose eruption in 1600 of the Huaynaputina volcano in South America, and a number of other factors. In Europe, there were frosts, epidemics arose, crops fell, food riots broke out. In 1677, even the Thames in London froze over. The coldest period was from 1645 to 1715. Stradivari made his best violins from 1700 to 1720 from wood that had grown about 15-20 years before, that is, in the coldest years. Maybe that's why he made the most interesting violins? Then it gradually became warmer and the wood began to grow in wider rings, giving an uneven density, and therefore the sound quality of later masters did not reach the level of Stradivari and his colleagues. The Little Ice Age ended, and with it the golden age of the Cremonese masters ended. Coincidence? Hardly…

-- -- --

If you have to travel to Lombard cities in northern Italy, stop for a few hours in Cremona. Go to Piazza Roma, where the Stradivari house once stood, where he lived with his second wife. Then Mussolini demolished the house and in its place built a terrible building in his imperial style. It now has a shopping arcade. Go to Piazza Stradivari, where there is a monument to the great luthier.

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