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Journalism of Courage
Paganini had two of them. Heifetz owned 8216;8216;Dolphin,8217;8217; perhaps the best of the best. Itzhak Perlman bought 8216;8216;Soil8217;8217; from Yehudi Menuhin for 1.25 million. Christie8217;s sold 8216;8216;Lady Tennant8217;8217; at public auction last year for 2 million, and private owners have gotten more than twice as much in closed deals.
Nearly 270 years after his death, the genius of violin-maker Antonio Stradivari shines brightly as ever. So elegant do his violins sound, so easily do they play and so beautiful are they to behold that most of the 650 or so that survive are famous enough to have their own names. Even as the music from Stradivari8217;s instruments has captivated generations of concertgoers, their workmanship has confounded generations of scientists and artisans. Why does a Stradivarius sound the way it does? Why has no one been able to duplicate it?
Over the years experts in disciplines ranging from carpentry to historical climatology have brought provocative insights to the debate but no definitive model that a craftsman could take to the workshop. Into this quest a Swedish team has suggested something different: Instead of trying to build a duplicate Stradivarius part by part, start with a computer model, tinker with it electronically until its sound matches a Stradivarius8212;and then build it?
8216;8216;The violin is easy to measure geometrically,8217;8217; said structural engineer Mats Tinnsten from Mid Sweden University. 8216;8216;Then you can measure how it vibrates, look at the frequencies and other parameters. You excite it with a loudspeaker, knock on it with your knuckles.8217;8217;
After that it gets tricky. Violins are made of wood, and no two pieces of wood are exactly alike. Each violin, whether built by Stradivari or Tinnsten, is unique, and the challenge is to sculpt the wood8212;delicately shaving the top and the back8212;to 8216;8216;optimise8217;8217; the acoustical qualities. Stradivari, working in a pre-industrial age, did this by ear and hand with unsurpassed consistency and artistry. The Swedish team proposed building a violin with two tops. Carve one top, install it, and measure and calibrate the sound of the resulting instrument. Then load these parameters into the computer and carve a different piece of wood so as to duplicate the sound produced by the first. Only if the two-tops experiment succeeds will the team ask for the privilege of measuring and, perhaps, duplicating an actual Stradivarius.
The Swedish research, first presented last summer at the International Congress on Sound and Vibration, offers a new and welcome wrinkle on the Stradivari puzzle, said violin expert Thomas Sparks, director of string instrument technology at Indiana University. 8216;8216;Any time somebody does acoustical research, they really refine some of the earlier theories of why these instruments work the way they do,8217;8217; Sparks said.
Stradivari, better known by the Latinised version of his name, Stradivarius, learned his trade from the Amati family of Cremona, near Milan. Beginning with the Amatis, continuing with Stradivari and then Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesu, the Cremonese instrument-makers dominated the violin trade from 1560 to 1750. Stradivari, who was born in 1644 and died in 1737, 8216;8216;could consciously alter an instrument to obtain a desired result,8217;8217; said Sparks.
The key, some scientists have suggested, is that Stradivari used alpine spruce during a climatic era of uncommonly cold weather. Annual growth rings were close together, making the wood abnormally dense. Sparks has noted that the woods Stradivari used were almost devoid of sugars, saps, resins and other organics, leaving only fibre and lignum, the 8216;8216;glue8217;8217; that holds the fibre together. 8216;8216;Think of it as similar to mummification,8217;8217; Sparks said.
If a special curing process is the answer, the Swedish experiment could be doomed, because the raw material will require an as-yet-unknown pre-treatment. If curing is not the answer, though, then Sweden, with an ample supply of cold-weather trees, 8216;8216;should be able to produce a pretty good violin,8217;8217; Tinnsten said.
When the Italian economy nosedived in the late 18th century, the Cremonese went out of business. Craft guild records and family histories were squirreled away in multiple archives, confounding the efforts of both violin-makers and scientists to unearth them.
The Washington Post
