Sweet sound of old violins befuddle experts
Posted on Sunday, July 20, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/adg/News/231814/
An Arkansas violin maker and a European researcher used modern technology in an effort to explain why 300-yearold Cremonese violins sound better than new ones.
Terry Borman, a renowned luthier who makes violins at his Fayetteville home, and medical-imaging specialist Berend Stoel of the Netherlands examined classic Cremonese violins with a computer tomography (CT ) scanner to find subtle differences in the density of the Alpine spruce used to make the top of a violin.
Their findings were published online this month by the Public Library of Science, a San Francisco-based, scientific journal.
The researchers learned the spruce in the classic violins is more dense than that of modern violins in the same way a cubic foot of rock is more dense that a cubic foot of foam.
“We were trying to find out if there were any basic differences in the materials of new violins and the classic ones,” Borman said. “The density of the wood was one of the basic differences.”
The consensus is that no modern violin captures the sound quality of instruments made 300 years ago by Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri del Gusu. But it isn’t for a lack of effort by modernday researchers and violin makers like Borman who are interested in improving their craft.
Violins made by Stradivari, Guarneri and other Italians in the province of Cremona between 1650 and 1750 are the standard against which all violins are measured, Borman said.
In fact, there’s no secret or mystery to how the great Cremonese luthiers made the instruments, Borman said. They used the same varnish, tools and kinds of wood, but Borman and Stoel looked specifically at wood density, he said.
“Every violin is different,” said Borman, 52, who’s made violins for 32 years. “It’s complicated. For anyone to think any one thing will make that much of a difference, it’s crazy.
“ It’s pretty well accepted that Stradivari went to get the same varnish as everyone else. No one was trying to keep any kind of secret.”
The research by Borman and Stoel edges violin makers a bit closer to understanding nuances of those classic violins.
Researchers long have debated and studied why Cremonese violins sound superior.
For instance, a 2003 study by a University of Tennessee tree-ring expert and a Columbia University climatologist suggested the answer was in what they called a “Little Ice Age” that existed from the mid-1400 s to the mid-1800 s in Europe. The event caused Alpine spruce trees to grow more slowly, meaning trees were more dense than trees of today, the study suggested.
Two years earlier, that same Tennessee professor — Henri Grissino-Mayer — teamed with a researcher at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in a study of a famous violin purported to be made by Stradivari. Malcolm Cleaveland, now a UA professor emeritus of geosciences, helped present the team’s findings to the Violin Society of America in fall 2001.
Texas A&M University biochemist Joseph Nagyvary theorized decades ago that the great violin makers used chemicals to keep wood-eating worms away from their violins. The unintended consequence was better sound, Nagyvary contended.
Nagyvary has since confirmed his view with the help of other researchers in subsequent studies.
But for any researcher to suggest they’ve found a single answer doesn’t give enough recognition to the Cremonese violin makers, said Christopher Germain, a Philadelphia violin maker and past president of the American Federation of Violin and Bow Makers.
It’s the equivalent of saying Michelangelo had special paint that allowed him to paint the Sistine Chapel and that anyone could replicate his work if they only knew where to buy the paint.
“I’m somewhat skeptical of any claims that there’s a magic bullet out there, but not all investigators are as scholarly as Terry Borman is,” Germain said. “These headlines of ‘I’ve unraveled the secret of the varnish or the special treatment of the wood’ bother me.”
“The premise is there was one secret that will reveal everything,” he said. “That sells these geniuses short.”
Borman said his violin research gives “rock solid information others can build upon” in doing their own research about the sound quality of violins. But he, too, thinks the great artists had no hidden tricks.
Borman goes about making four or five violins a year in his downstairs workshop on the east end of his Rodgers Drive house. It takes two months to make just one, and his latest effort will be shipped to a musician in the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra.
“People don’t expect wellknown violin makers to come out of Arkansas,” Borman said.
Borman’s research with the CT scanner started after esteemed violinist Kyung-Wha Chung commissioned him to produce an exact copy of her Guarneri violin, made in 1735.
The scanner measured the instrument’s exact dimensions. In all, five classic Cremonese violins were studied. Two were made by Guarneri; Stradivari made the others.
The five classic instruments and eight modern ones were examined with a CT scanner at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. The scanner allowed examination of the instruments without dismantling them, an important consideration because the violins are worth millions of dollars.
Stoel wrote the computer program that allowed the scanner to detect the differences in wood density in violins.
Jim Woodhouse, a Cambridge University engineering professor whose research includes violin acoustics, described the study by Borman and Stoel as “forensic evidence about the details of these famous old violins.”
“This could possibly help those who try to reproduce every detail of how the old Italian makers worked,” Woodhouse wrote in an e-mail. “But it isn’t clear to me that what they have reported has any direct consequence for the sound of the violin.”
No study can account for other unmeasurable factors, such as a violinist simply playing an instrument because he is more confident with a Stradivarius in his hands, Woodhouse said.
“Better playing makes better music, and the instrument may get some of the credit,” Woodhouse said.
Borman shares that view.
“The violin doesn’t do anything without the musician,” he said. “A great violinist with a great violin is unsurpassable, but a great violinist can make a mediocre violin sound good.”