New Family of Violins Hosts "Coming Out" Party

October 28, 2005--A new consort of eight acoustically matched violins has revived a long-lost musical concept among instrument makers and musicians that dates back to the 16 th century and is now poised to re-enter the musical mainstream. Acousticians, musicians, composers and music lovers from all over the world are coming together to celebrate what is essentially a "coming out party" for the violin family. The Octet 2005 Convention will take place from October 30 through November 2 in Ithaca, New York.

Largely the creation of 94-year-old violin maker Carleen Maley Hutchins, the instruments in the octet range from a seven-foot contrabass to a tiny treble violin tuned a full octave above the tuning of a standard violin. Not only do they boast a broader musical range than traditional instruments, but they are also designed to produce fuller sounds with greater power to better meet the performance requirements of large modern concert halls.

The upcoming convention will feature the usual workshops and seminars, as well as two recitals and one big gala concert featuring two full violin octets: the eponymous Hutchins Consort from California, and the Ithaca-based Albert Consort, along with numerous guest musicians. "As far as I know, there's going to be more of these instruments under one roof at one time than has ever happened before, so it's a kind of historic occasion," says conference organizer Robert Spear, himself a violin maker based in Ithaca, New York, who first met Hutchins in the 1970s, when she was teaching in Montclair, New Jersey.

Hutchins grew up playing the trumpet and never played a stringed instrument until she was 40, when a few friends formed a chamber group and needed a viola player. Lacking an instrument, Hutchins asked her uncle, who built violins, to make one for her. Instead, he told her to build one herself and gave her the address of a Russian violin maker in New York City. "He didn't think much of a woman making an instrument, but at least he sold me a blueprint and a book and told me how to get started," she recalls of that early benefactor. Already an accomplished carpenter – she and her husband built their own house – Hutchins built her first viola over the next two years. She would eventually work with some of the best violin makers in the world.

The origin of the violin octet dates back to 1957, when composer Henry Brant came to Hutchins and asked if she'd be interested in building a set of violins of graduated sizes: one at each half-octave, sufficient to cover the entire range of written music found on a piano keyboard; traditional violins, violas, cellos and basses are much more limited in range. Hutchins recalls that it took her ten minutes to agree to take on the project, and ten years before she produced the first full octet. With numerous collaborators, she has been making further refinements and improvements in the design ever since.

Along the way, Hutchins rediscovered lost musical principles once described by the 17 th century German composer Michael Praetorius. A musicologist colleague of Hutchins happened upon a three-volume treatise by Praetorius, Syntagma Musicum , written in 1619, which detailed musical practices and instruments of the period. The composer described an octet family of violins tuned to the same ranges Hutchins was developing. For instance, the baritone violin – on a par with a large cello – featured the same dimension and string length as that pictured in Praetorius' text. The same held true for the contrabass violin.

Praetorius hadn't invented such an octet, Hutchins says, merely described (and illustrated) it: "He was writing about something that was common knowledge at the time. That knowledge was lost." She surmises that the tone of these early octets was poor, and when the great 17 th century violin builders began producing violins with exquisite resonances perfectly suited to the performance needs of the era, the earlier designs were abandoned.

Building a quality violin requires a delicate balance between two key resonances. First is the natural wood resonance, which can be tuned when the instrument is in pieces. The unattached wooden top and back of the instrument are known as “free plates.” Traditionally, these were tuned by carving away the wood underneath to specific thicknesses to achieve the desired natural resonances. The violin maker would flex the wood plate in his or her hand and tap them with a fingertip while holding it close to the ear, listening to the resulting ring. It was as much art as science and relied heavily on the 'ear" of the individual maker.

Hutchins and her colleagues changed all that. She built upon the work of early violin acousticians, using a loudspeaker rather than her fingertip to cause the plates to vibrate. She also spread glitter on the plates and watched where it settled to find the right lines to produce the desired resonances. "So now you could not only hear the tap-tones, you could also see the patterns," says Spear, who describes the technique as "a fundamental change in the way that good violin makers tune their plates."

Of equal importance is the air resonance produced once the instrument has been assembled; it arises from the cavity of the body of the instrument. Spear likens the effect to blowing air across a glass bottle with a narrow neck, producing a tone. Although the analogy is inexact, a violin has two holes that serve the same purpose as the bottleneck. Hutchins and her collaborators studied several hundred master violins and discovered that the desired resonances always occurred within a very narrow range on these instruments: the two open middle strings. The D string, second from the bottom, provided the fundamental air resonance. The wood resonance fell one-fifth higher, on the next highest violin string (violins are tuned in fifths).

The best classical composers understood the limitations of the traditional instruments and wrote music tailored to their strengths, based on where the key resonances were usually found. By way of example, Hutchins points to Mozart's two-viola quintets, which placed the first viola through the upper of the two main resonances, and the second viola through the lower. But in the new violin octets, those resonances have shifted. So most classical pieces must be transposed and rearranged for the octet's tuning and harmonics, although there are also many composers who write music especially for the octet.

For the same reason, classical musicians must reacquaint themselves with what are essentially new instruments. The world-renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma has worked extensively with one of Hutchins' alto violins, and found he had to play the instrument a bit differently in order to achieve the resonances he needed for Bela Bartok's viola concerto, for example.

Spear attributes this to the fact that, because of the shifted resonances, the octet violins have better tonal uniformity across the strings than traditional instruments. "A common complaint among musicians is that as one goes from string to string [on some traditional instruments], each one can sound like it's on a different instrument. Skilled players do a terrific job of minimizing these effects," he says. "When suddenly they don't have to compensate for it any more, it's almost a handicap at first until they realize that particular problem is gone."

The next step is to build even more violin families – a full octet can take up to 2000 hours—and spread the word among musicians and composers of their unique capabilities. "The entire life of the violin octet has really been spent in the realm of academics and science," says Spear. "This convention is the first time these instruments are being treated not as objects of science or acoustic theories, but as real musical instruments for real musicians in the real world. They're finally leaving the laboratory for the concert stage."

Written by Jennifer Ouellette

Contact:

Martha J. Heil
mheil@aip.org
American Institute of Physics
301-209-3088