I played a good Stradivari violin once, just for a few
minutes. I’m a lousy violinist, but it was an amazing experience. On the same occasion, I played a good
Guarneri “del Gesu,” and it was equally amazing. Now, every other violin is just not so
good.
This is one of the great problems of the violin-building
world. There are maybe a thousand or so
of these exceptional old violins out there.
Their number can only decrease; they are getting more and more expensive
(one recently sold for north of $18 million; the New York Times had to correct
its initial report that it had sold for $18 billion). There are some excellent modern makers out
there, making some excellent violins for a fraction of that price, but if they
are honest, they’ll concede that they are still chasing the old Cremonese
makers. Meanwhile, anyone owning one of
these treasures gets increasingly nervous whenever they enter a taxi or
relinquish their instruments to the TSA.
Modern luthiers have tried all manner of tricks to match the
old masters. Some claim to divine
mathematical and geometrical formulae from the shapes of the old violins. Some “tune” their fiddles by watching the
patterned dance of iron filings as they blast the wood with amplified sound. Some find markings in the wood of these old
fiddles and from these scratches extrapolate whole systems of woodworking. Several
Cremonese fiddles have been so thoroughly studied, by CT scans, X-rays, UV
imaging, density mapping, frequency mapping, dynamic FLIR, HPLC analysis—as to
become open books.
Then there are the dilettantes, techies with their
particular tools. Every year, like
clockwork, one solves the “Secret of Stradivari.” It’s propolis in the varnish! It’s wood soaked in the river Po! It’s
fungus! It’s pollen in the varnish! It’s
wood from trees grown during the “little ice age”! Strangely, these discoveries
have done nothing to change the status quo: Strads are still Strads, and
everything else is still everything else.
I write this as an introduction to an enlightening and
confounding conversation I had, which I attempt to document here. The Real Doctor and I attended a performance
by the Miskatonic Pro(-Am) Musica. The program
was conventional, and the performance was what might be expected from a mixture
of professionals and enthusiastic amateurs.
One of those amateurs is Dr. D. Avril Poisson, a biologist of some note. Dr. Poisson’s fiddle was extremely unusual, and as the Real Doctor and I are students of lutherie, we sought her
out after the performance, and she graciously talked with us (she apparently is
aware of my having provided her with some favorable publicity).
In its form, Dr. Poisson’s fiddle was classic—the front had
deep arching and a well-formed recurve, very much in the earlier Cremonese
style; the outline, scroll, and f-holes also were suggestive of the Brescian
school. The most obvious thing about the
fiddle, though, was its color. Except
for the strings, pegs, and bridge, it was a pale, semi-translucent milky hue, made
of some well-polished plastic shot through with fine blue streaks.
“You may not believe it,” Dr. Poisson said, “but this is”—she emphasized the word to prevent
any argument—“a 1709 Rogeri, the ‘Miskatonic.’”
She played on it a bit (with a wooden bow), and it sounded
fantastic.
I would no more ask a performer if I could borrow their
fiddle for a moment than I would ask to borrow their spouse for a romantic
tryst—but she insisted that both the Real Doctor and I play it, and we both
found it to be an amazing instrument.
I’ve never played a Rogeri before, and maybe I didn’t then, but I did
play an instrument that was fully the equal of the great old fiddles I’d
sampled.
While both the Real Doctor and I were dumbfoundedly playing
her fiddle, Dr. Poisson was smiling like—well, the best reference I can think
of is the Man in Black during the swordfight in The Princess Bride. She
opened up a double case, revealing another milky, blue-streaked fiddle. “This is also the 1709 Rogeri,” she said, and
urged us both to play it. The feeling
was uncanny. It was like meeting a
person so remarkable that they must be unique in all the world—then being
introduced to their identical (and identically remarkable) twin. “There are three more 1709 Rogeris back at
Miskatonic that play exactly like these, and we’re making one every three weeks.”
Neither the Real Doctor nor I said much that was coherent,
just a string of fragmentary questions, while Dr. Poisson beamed. “This is actually the debut concert for this
fiddle, which is odd given that it’s 1709.
It hasn’t been officially revealed, but I suppose now that you’ve seen
it you’ll blog about it, and I want to make sure the story is straight. First, you’ve got to give most of the credit
to Dr. Barry O. Lodge of the Materials Science department at Miskatonic
University. I am, if you will, second to
last author, and there are a dozen or more engineering students in front of me.”
“You know the Betts Project?” she asked. (This is an effort by a well-known group of
luthiers to use the latest technology to make a perfect replica of the Library
of Congress’ 1704 “Betts” Stradivarius.
High-precision CT scans of the instrument are used to make a
stereolithographic computer image of the violin, and this is fed into a CNC
wood carving machine, producing a precise replica down to fractions of tenths
of millimeters. “That’s just cargo-cult
lutherie—they think that if they replicate the form, they’ll replicate the
magic, just like some stone-age Polynesians making detailed replicas of landing
strips and hoping some airplanes full of goodies will arrive. If they don’t capture that magic, it’s
because they’ve failed to copy the form precisely enough. Well, those cargo-cultists at Oberlin have
made an agreeable violin, but it’s not the Betts.”
“See, they’ve got the shape as close as can be, but they
don’t have the exact same piece of wood, with the exact same grain and
imperfections and density and hardness variations, and they’re using some
modern varnish that has its own differences in hardness and whatnot. It’s the way the sound energy travels through
the wood that makes the Betts what it is.
I’ve no doubt that the masters of Cremona were sensitive—maybe on some
subconscious level, maybe as the result of years of experience with wood—to
those subtleties, and this stupid Betts Project just ignores it. I mean, they try to match the wood’s
appearance, but really, they just have a Betts-shaped box, and it’s not like
it’s any more affordable for a promising young student.
“So, Barry O. Lodge was working on extending the abilities of
3D printing, and he’d found that the community had basically run into the same
wall as the Betts people—extraordinarily high fidelity replication of shape,
complete ignorance of micro-scale variation in mechanical properties. It’s funny, the Betts people got there
reductively, by milling away wood, the 3DP people got there additively, by
cementing together microscopic particles of resin. Anyway, he has discovered a way to accurately
measure mechanical properties like hardness, density, sound velocity, and so on
at a 10th of a millimeter scale.
Scanning takes forever, and the files are huge, but you really have the
soul of the thing.
“If the soul is in the mechanical properties, I suppose,”
interjected the Real Doctor, “but…”
Dr. Poisson pointed at the “Rogeri” in the Real Doctor’s
hands. “That is an instrument,” she
said, “a tool for making art. Its soul
is its unique voice, its ability to produce music, at which it has few
equals.”
I was examining the other “Rogeri.” The purfling was a faint line of light grey
around the edges. Inside, there was a
slight elevation where the label would be, as if a slip of parchment had been
embalmed in resin. The visual effect
left me feeling very uneasy. Wood was
once alive, and bears time’s traces on a growing tree; the parchment in a
fiddle is signed by the hand of the maker. The visual impact of this instrument, which sounded so lovely and lively, gave me the creeps—a dead thing, mummified in plastic.
I handed it back to Dr. Poisson with some relief.
“So, from file to fiddle?” I asked.
“3D printing taken to a new level. It’s all wrapped up in engineering and
patents. I don’t understand most of it,
and what I might understand, I’m not allowed to know for legal reasons. The chemistry is appealing, doping the resin
with aligned, tuned nanotubes and other super-secret stuff to give it exactly
the right mechanical properties on a micrometer-by-micrometer scale. The resin is proprietary, but it’s the reason
for the sickly color, and some of the dopants are blue, so that’s why the
streakiness. I really don’t love the
visuals, but we can’t fix it yet. The
printer has replicated the mechanical properties of the varnish exactly, and
adding any tint will screw up everything.
So I play with my eyes closed, and I’m playing the Rogeri.” Which she did for us, again, and it still
sounded wonderful—but I had to close my eyes.
When she had stopped, I asked, “Dr. Lodge wasn’t working on all this for
lutherie, was he?”
“Goodness no,” she answered
"He’s an engineer, so he was doing this because it seemed hard but
possible. He presented a summary of this
work at a symposium, and was looking for ideas.
He was thinking of tools and ornithopter drones, but I suggested fiddles
would be a real test.”
The Real Doctor had been studying the “Rogeri” with her
usual intensity, and didn’t break her gaze on the instrument when she asked,
“The soundpost—is it of one piece with the instrument? And, how does it sound side by side with the
real Rogeri?”
Dr. Poisson smiled, and corrected the Real Doctor. “This is
the real Rogeri, and so is that one there.
It’s one piece, everything printed in one go but the fittings.
“Of course, the Rogeri wasn’t the first thing Barry and I
tried. We wanted to prove the concept on
a more modest scale, so we chose a couple of modest student-level instruments—ones
that had noticeable character, though not always good. I played on them, day in and day out, for a
couple of months. The sacrifices we make
for science! I didn’t like them, but I
could recognize each of them easily, even in a crowd. Barry scanned and printed them, and we had
the luthier string them up, and they were perfect clones—every annoying flaw
and shortcoming, and even the few nice things, had been replicated. Can you imagine what a boon it will be, when
every student of the violin can play a really good fiddle—this, or the “Vieuxtemps”
or the “Viotti” or their like—instead of fighting against some atrocious
Chinese factory box?”
“Yeah, we’re facing the same thing right now with our
nephews,” answered the Real Doctor. She
was starting to look a little worried, and looked at the “Rogeri” as if it
might bite her. “But how does this” she said, giving the grey-blue
fiddle back to Dr. Poisson “sound side-by-side with the real Rogeri?”
Dr. Poisson’s dislike of the emphasis on “real” was visible,
but, with a shrug, she put her fiddle back in the double case next to its
twin. “Well,” she said, “you can try for
yourself. We still haven’t told the
regents of the university, who own the original. I told them with perfect honesty that I am
traveling with the ‘Miskatonic’ Rogeri.”
She rummaged through a travel case, and pulled out a Mason jar,
three-quarters full of very fine, wood-brown dust, and offered it to the Real
Doctor along with a bow. “The scanning
process is pretty hard on the original, but to me and Barry, that seems a fair
price.”
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