Myths and preconceptions revisited: Violins

[MIDI Life Crisis]

If she hates it. It looks like the piano has banjo balls, which of course makes the pedals....

[Bowman]

No dispute that there is prejudice against modern violins. Regarding comparison tests, however, no matter who made the instruments and when, there are number of things which need to be taken into consideration.

1. Individual playing styles: there are players, even really great ones, who simply can’t play instruments of a particular maker. Either they consistently under- or overpower them, or their preferred style of play just doesn’t suit an instrument. Learning to play a fine stringed instrument really well can take several years (decades? a lifetime?).

2. Bows: some fine instruments sound really great with a particular kind of bow, but mediocre with another one. Finding the right bow for an instrument can take a very long time and is often counter-intuitive.

3. Set-up: stringed instruments need periodic adjustments and changes of bridge and sound-post, and these adjustments are quite personal. What one player likes can be anathema to another. Fingerboards and bass bars require less frequent or personal attention, but there are almost no fine old instruments with their original equipment around. Most older instruments don’t have their original necks. They were changed at some point to allow for greater tension in order to produce more sound. Bows need regular rehairing, which is an art unto itself. Some players like coarser or finer hair than others. Some like more or less hair on the bow. Some hair doesn’t work at all for some bows.

4. Weather: wood changes shape and density with changes in temperature and humidity. Most stringed instruments are made with lots of different types of wood, which expand and contract at different rates. Often, just the arrival of an afternoon rainstorm can make an instrument that sounded great in the morning mediocre by evening - or vice-versa.

5. Hall acoustics: there are halls in which anything sounds good, and halls in which everything sounds awful. And then there are most halls which are somewhere in between. Instrument A may sound fantastic in hall X and terrible in hall Y, whereas for instrument B it's the other way round.

Several years ago, I found myself conducting for a fairly well-known European-based soloist who was playing a very fine Strad. Just before we went on stage for his concerto, I asked him if the instrument belonged to him. He laughed. “I can just barely afford the insurance on it.”

As for myself, I spent most of my playing career with a modern instrument, the only thing I could afford when I was starting out. I got into a major symphony orchestra with it and played fairly big deal shows in a lot of interesting places. The instrument was never an issue. It took me several years to find the right bow and another half-decade or so to find the right person to adjust it to my needs. The place it sounded the absolute best was the Musikverein in Vienna. Well, yeah. Almost anything sounds great in there.

However, fairly early in my career someone loaned me a Guarneri del Gesù for a month long tour. Wow. It sounded great all the time, every single day, every hall, in all kinds of heat and humidity (or lack thereof). For one concert my plane was late and I went straight from airport to hall, no time for a warm up. The instrument sounded fantastic from note one. That del Gesù really suited me, but the owner wasn’t willing to go past a one month loan. Too bad. Later on, I heard that one of my colleagues had tried the same instrument and hated it.

Conclusion: no rules. Modern instruments can be just as good as older ones. The results of comparison tests like these only tell you what those players and listeners thought on that particular day in that particular hall.

Bowman.

[Shooshie]

Bowman, I hear every word you're saying, and I completely understand. That's why this subject tears me up so badly. Among my major loves in life are: 1) The Sciences, and 2) The Arts; not necessarily in any order. The science side of me says there's an explanation for everything. The arts side says "some things just can't be [easily] explained." See? That parenthetical insert was my science side fighting with my artistic side before the sentence was even finished.

In another post I mentioned the Selmer Mark VI saxophone series, which has a particular overtone structure that I just love. Many say it's just a myth. They must be deaf. Other makers have tried to duplicate it, but failed. Actually, there is a Dutch maker, a man making individual saxophones, who is currently succeeding. I forget his name. But that exception proves the rule; only those attuned to extreme details, with understanding and feeling for what they are witnessing and doing, can recreate masterpieces that succeed as originals. In the art world, forgers command huge fees for work that remains anonymous for obvious reasons. They can actually create a "new" work by an artist dead for hundreds of years, and it will fool all the appraisers.

My conclusion has to be able to satisfy both sides of me. I can only conclude that a test like the one in the video cannot be conducted under conditions that will actually override all valid criticisms. Or if so, it would require far more preparation and participation of the world's greatest artists, not merely some great players. Choosing the artists would be almost impossible for a committee, and an individual's choices would reflect biases. I don't think it could be done.

In a way, it's like our old DP vs. Logic comparison: to accurately compare both DAWs would require an expert at both, and not just an expert, but one who is completely artistically expressive in either medium. I probably qualify on the DP side, but even though I've studied Logic extensively, I'm just not that guy, not anywhere close to it. I don't think I've met someone who actually is "that guy/girl" in both DAWs.

Another comparison: I've got sax mouthpieces that I had customized decades ago by a very particular technician. We went through a bottle of wine in my studio while we worked together on those mouthpieces all night. I used those ever since. A few years back I thought it was time for an upgrade. I bought some great mouthpieces and figured all I had to do was learn them. If I learned every nuance of those mouthpieces, I'd play them as well as "my" mouthpieces of old. I got very good at them, but when I go back to the old ones, suddenly my technique and musicianship just leap forward an order of magnitude. I can do anything on the old customized ones, but I'm simply not as good on the new ones.

When I had those mouthpieces customized, the results were similar; instantly my technique was transformed. It didn't take me months or years to learn them. Just a day. Maybe minutes. I've worked at the new "great" mouthpieces for years, and still cannot be the player on them that I am on the old ones.

Obviously there are differences. Obviously an electron microscope could reveal huge differences in surfaces, materials, scratches, and whatever, but I'll never do such a thing. There MUST be an explanation, but it's out of my reach. So, I'm left with my own mythology. I've got the mouthpieces of the gods. The best mouthpieces I can get today do not compare. Others will say it just requires careful reproduction or manufacturing, but so far that has been unsuccessful.

Then, on the other side, there's the piano technician I told about in a previous post. Mike told us what I'd expect most people to say: that immortal piano in Studio B is not just any piano. It's like my mouthpiece, your bow, Heifetz's violin. A technician cannot change that. But I know a technician who can! He completely changed the character of every one of our pianos. What were originally 6 very distinct personalities dissolved into a single superstar piano voice that I could no longer tell apart. His name is Rick Florence, and he's at ASU in Tempe, Arizona. He should be a millionaire, but he's a humble workman.

The dichotomies are incredible.

My science side and my artistic side are each about to explode!

Shooshie

[Shooshie]

Sorry... not done yet.

From the great violinists, I constantly hear that the Guarneri del Gesù is the real star of the 18th century Italian makers. Heifetz preferred his del Gesù over his Strad. So did Szeryng. I think Perlman has said as much, and has recorded on both. I love his Guarneri del Gesù recordings of the Bach Solo Partitas and Sonatas.

The point is that Bartolomeo Giuseppe Antonio Guarneri, del Gesù didn't just hit the mark a time or two. He got it right over and over and over. Did he get a stash of great wood? Did he have access to some amazing ingredients for his varnish? Or did he just figure it out? Somehow he knew, and he repeated over and over.

Antonio Stradivarius did, too; I shouldn't exclude him. Whatever they were doing, they did repeatedly. It was no accident. If there are current makers hitting that mark, then they probably know why. Bow makers who hit that mark know why. Mouthpiece makers who hit that mark know why. Selmer, the maker of saxophones, once knew why their Mark VI was so great until those makers all died. Now even Selmer cannot make a Mark VI.

Whatever it is is specific, and it takes an artist to find it. I am privileged to know of such an artist who can do that for pianos after they are built. (Call up Rick Florence, and he'll deny every word of it; he's a modest man.) I've knew an amazing mouthpiece artist. (Les Nicholas, a clarinetist) I know a sax builder who quit the business, but was such an artist. (Tom Layton, last seen in Lawton, Oklahoma making recumbent bicycles and amazing human prosthetics.) I could go on and on, because all my life I've been naturally drawn to such people, for whatever reasons. But I'm seeing a pattern emerging.

There is little difference between the sources of science and art. Those who excel at either produce results that are almost mythological for those who do not understand them. Who was it that said something to the effect that high technology, witnessed by those who do not understand it, will be perceived as magic? There's our mythology.

Werner von Braun was an artist. He just made Saturn V rockets.
Isaac Newton was an artist. He just invented Calculus, Newton's Laws of Motion, and many, many other things that still blow our minds.
Einstein was an artist.
Galileo, Copernicus, Darwin, Feynman, Claude Shannon, Mandelbrot... they're all artists of empirical sciences that require just as much of that "something extra" as was possessed by Stradivarius, Guarneri, or for that matter, Heifetz.

I don't think that science or art happens without a fairly vigorous mixture of right-brain and left-brain thinking. Which one dominates depends on the subject matter, but something new and creative will not happen until both are very much in play.

To try to strip one side of that mix out and say "See? It doesn't work when we do that" is a form of ignorance looking for magic or else looking for proof that it doesn't exist. I'm here to say that magic is very much real, and it happens when you rub together two lobes of the brain and make creative observations. Incidentally, the famous neurosurgeon, Oliver Sacks, said that when doing autopsies he always could tell when the deceased was a well-developed professional musician. He said the Corpus Callosum in such individuals was many times its size in "normal" people. [Corpus Callosum is the communications switchboard between the two hemispheres of the brain.] That is because of the constant development of neural connections that takes place when training to be a professional musician. The more you develop musical ability, the more it affects your mind. The more connections you have in your brain, the easier it is to solve difficult problems.

Practice doesn't necessarily make perfect, but it makes music, art and science.

Shooshie

[MIDI Life Crisis]

As an aside...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6v7o3IvUEAE

Cannot recommend this album enough:

http://www.anneakikomeyers.com/Four-Sea ... aldi-Album

[bayswater]

The science side of me says there's an explanation for everything. The arts side says "some things just can't be [easily] explained."

I used to have that problem. Consider that it doesn't matter if science can explain everything. Science hasn't really claimed to be able to do it for a little over 100 years, and there has never been any expectation that it could aside from banal explanations based on infinite reductionism. In the end, some things are best not explained at all, let alone scientifically.

[monkey man]

I know it's a bit of a leap to go from violins to drum kits...

Naaa... a mere flick of a tiddlywink away, Jimbo.

I'm out of my league here and so will continue to marvel at the talent, experience and knowledge we have here at the 'Nation.

Carry on.