We're not going to lie. The sound of the death whistle is the most frightening thing we've ever heard. It literally sounds like a screeching zombie. We can only imagine what it would be like to hear hundreds of the whistles from an Aztec army on the march. We're not entirely certain what the whistles were used for, however. They may have been used as an intimidation tactic in war, but there's one aspect of Aztec society in which they certainly played a role: human sacrifice.
In 1999, a 20-year-old sacrificial victim was discovered by archaeologists, clutching a death whistle in his hands. He was found in a temple to the wind god Ehecatl at Tlatelolco, suggesting to some scholars that the whistles were meant to evoke the howling wind. In any case, modern musicians and anthropologists have grown more interested in the role the whistles played in the ongoing indigenous history of Mexico.
Hm, well, if that is the most frightening thing the author ever heard, I suspect he is not familiar with the electronic music of Karlheinz Stockhausen or Edgar Varèse:
On the other hand, this does give us some insight into why the Spartans marched to the sounds of flutes: maybe their flutes were more scary than we thought!
Marching in step, while perhaps known to other Greeks, was particularly associated with the Spartan army. Famously, their troops at Mantinea advanced towards the Argive army with a slow rhythmic pace to the sound of many flutes, not for a religious reason, as Thucydides explains to his readers, but in order to maintain a steady pace and to prevent the ranks from breaking up, which tended to occur in large armies (5.70).
Was this the result of practicing the Precipitato to the Piano Sonata No. 7 by Prokofiev without warming up properly?
And we may never know what happened to this 300-year-old viola da gamba in the hold of an Alitalia flight:
This is what happens when you don't purchase a seat in the cabin for your cello:
I'm not sure what happened here: a group improvisation just got completely out of hand? The aftermath of a rehearsal of The Who, circa 1970? A really extreme case of bad karma?
Another instrument destroyed by an airline, but I knew a lutenist who had the pegbox of his lute snapped off by an elevator door closing. Never, ever carry your lute around in a soft case!
Why yes, I was stuck for a good theme for a post this morning, why do you ask?
Let's end with some soothing lute music. This is the fantasia Semper Dowland Semper Dolens ("Always Dowland, Always Sad") by John Dowland, played by Julian Bream.
Just ran across a fun little video with Amelie for the Flute Channel trying out different-priced flutes at Twigg Musique in Montreal.
Most student and lower-priced flutes are "closed hole" meaning that the valves are solid. Professional flutes are often "open hole" meaning that each valve has a hole in the middle. The open hole flutes allow the player more control and more options with alternative fingerings and micro-tones. It is interesting to hear the different flutes, from a few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars. The flute player I used to play with a lot had a flute with a solid gold head joint and he even cut his own embrochure holes to customize them.
One comment on the above video over at Slipped Disc baldly says that you usually sound like yourself on different instruments. There is a lot of truth to this, but it takes time. I had a gig for a while where I had to go into different environments and play amplified through a small amplifier. I used a contact microphone stuck onto the soundboard. I did not want to use my $10,000 concert guitar in these environments so I played on my teaching guitar, a student Yamaha worth a few hundred dollars. What I discovered, after a few months, was that I learned to "play" the combination of Yamaha guitar and small amplifier so that I could get a sound that was more pleasing to me. What this involved was a quite different "touch" with the right hand fingers and nails. Essentially, within the limits of the instrument, you create the sound that your ear wants to hear. Much of this process is quite unconscious. It is also something you do in different concert halls: you experiment with different touches and attacks to find what sounds best in that particular acoustic environment. Again, much of this is unconscious.
This is one of those unnamed skills that go into being a musician. Your ear has a particular sensitivity to the subtleties of tone color. Many people don't have it. I had a student who was quite accomplished except for the fact that she just could not seem to make a good sound. Every lesson I would work with her, adjusting her hand position and touch and by the end of the lesson, she was making a pretty good sound. But the next week she would come back making the same lousy sound as before. She just didn't have the "ear" for it. Yes, this is just another in a long list of reasons why Malcolm Gladwell's silly theory that with 10,000 hours of work nearly everyone can learn a craft is just wrong. Not unless you have these mysterious abilities...
Here is one of the pieces we used to work on. It was that slow middle section that she just couldn't find the right sound for.
Well, one anyway. A Polish instrument builder named Sławomir Zubrzycki has delved into the Codex Atlanticus, a 1200 page compendium of Leonardo's notes, to find described a fascinating musical instrument with a keyboard like a harpsichord, but using rotating wheels covered with horsehair to sound the strings, allowing for sustained notes. Here, from Classic FM, is a clip. The interview is in Polish, but you get to hear the instrument.
What fascinates me, wearing my musicology hat, is that he chooses the Folias de Espagne by Marais, to demonstrate the sound of the instrument. This is a composition dating from the late 17th century used to demonstrate an instrument envisioned by Leonardo in the late 15th, early 16th century. This reminds me of the old joke: a musicologist is someone who can perform a piece of 18th century music using 15th century ornaments!
Now let me offer an historical critique. The musical instrument that Leonardo might have been thinking of is the hurdy gurdy, a venerably ancient instrument whose strings are sounded with a rotating wheel, just as in this case. The difference is the addition of a keyboard, which was present in various forms of the organ in Leonardo's time. Now, the question is, did Leonardo think of putting them together, or was it our Polish friend? We really need to see those excerpts from the original notes of Leonardo to know. Here is are some photos of the hurdy gurdy:
Medieval hurdy gurdy
Later form of hurdy gurdy
As you can see, both these models have little primitive keyboards.
Ever since I was a child I have felt the magic of musical instruments. They just have a kind of numinous aura: they speak when you pick them up or touch them! Not all of them, of course. You can't actually pick up a piano and if you pick up a tuba it does not have quite the same magic.
I suppose I am mostly talking about the kind of instruments that were always kicking around our house. My mother was mostly a fiddler so there were a few violins in cases hidden behind the easy chair and under the couch. But there were also guitars, mandolins, banjos, an octophone and even an upright piano, though that felt more like a musical piece of furniture.
But string instruments, they definitely have the magic. Because, when you pick them up, they thrum with tension. The slightest tap or movement can set the strings moving and with them a sound. There is an energy, a dynamic, to string instruments even when they are not being played. The strings of a classical guitar, when tuned up to pitch, exert a torque of about 125 lbs on the bridge.
String instruments speak to you as you touch them. Nothing else in the house does--well, ok, the radio (we didn't have a tv), but that kind of "speech" is all too mundane. No, the speech of string instruments is like the speech of oracles: obscure and veiled in mystery.
To many guitarists their instruments have a personality: B. B. King's Gibson was always Lucille and she even has her own entry in Wikipedia.
Click to enlarge
He even wrote a song for her:
My guitar is named Hermione, not after the character in Harry Potter, as I named her in 1983, when she was built, long before the books were written. No, she is named after the daughter of Helen of Troy, said to be even more beautiful. Instead of the face that launched a thousand ships, my Hermione is the sound that launched a thousand concerts:
The tailpiece just came apart. Well, it is a fairly old instrument, a Stradivarius dating from 1689. Hmm, J. S. Bach was just four years old when this was built. I have had the exact same experience with my guitar, a 1983 Robert Holroyd:
You have no idea of the shock and horror that you feel when you open your case and find your instrument, companion of untold hours of practice and performance, suddenly come apart! Luckily, these things can be fixed and my guitar, and, presumably Ragin's violin, was made good as new.
Musicians and their instruments have a nearly-symbiotic relationship in which your body and the instrument almost become one. There is a science-fiction short story by John Varley, "Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance" that captures a bit of this feeling. It is not just the most accomplished professionals who feel this--music students often do as well. I was talking with a small group of students once when one of them, who was sitting down with her guitar face-up on her lap, dropped her tuning fork (which is a rather heavy, though small, metal object which can seriously harm an instrument) on the soundboard of her guitar. All of us reacted with horror, as if we were witness to a car crash. You have to be very careful with the tops of guitars, they bruise easily!
I will spare you the horror story of the lutenist whose pegbox fell afoul of an elevator door and was snapped off. You can image how nasty that was:
The problem with string instruments is that the strings exert a considerable force on the structure. A classical guitar, tuned up to pitch, puts about 125 lbs of torque on the bridge. 24 hours a day. Year after year. Over time this distorts the plane of the soundboard and the bridge may even come off at some point. Very few of the lutes from the 16th and 17th centuries have survived to the present because they are very fragile instruments.
Instruments have to be constantly maintained. In the case of my guitar, due to the dry climate where I live, I keep a humidifier inside the guitar at all times. Strings have to be replaced after sixty or so hours of use. The whole instrument (frets, varnish, tuning pegs, etc.) has to be restored every twenty years. Wind instruments need careful maintaining too. Flutes and other instruments with keys that close soundholes have to have those keys carefully adjusted and the pads, which close the soundhole, replaced on a regular basis. Things like the double reeds for oboes and bassoons that are the origin of the sound, are carefully manufactured, by hand, by the players, who carve them individually for their particular technique.
I won't even get into the intricacies of re-hairing a violin bow:
Actually, a lot of this is what attracted me to music in the first place. It is the very concreteness of the instrument and what you have to do to play it, both with your body and the instrument, that keeps you connected with the physical universe. Philosophy just seemed too abstract. Music is often called the most abstract of the fine arts: it is evanescent, evaporating into nothing as soon as the sound stops. But to the people who play the music, it is pretty concrete: sound vibrations coming from vibrating strings and soundboards, columns of air and drumheads, produced by fingers, nails, lips, hands, bows and drumsticks.
Musical instruments are fragile structures, with delicate balances and maintaining precise tensions and stresses. This is why it is so upsetting for musicians to have their instruments put into the cargo hold of an airplane, stacked under suitcases, even inspected by officers who know nothing of their fragility. And the worst indignity: confiscated for some obscure bureaucratic reason.
Whew, time to listen to one of those instruments. This is the very fine lutenist Paul O'Dette playing lute music of early 16th century Venice:
The kind of modern madness I want to talk about is not the idea of hammering away at a dissonant tone cluster for twenty minutes, or going to great lengths to have no repeating rhythms or droning away at a single note for hours. Those are mere aesthetic misdemeanors. No, what I am talking about is a political modern madness that affects musicians in a most unpleasant way: the dangers of traveling by air or across borders with a violin and bow. Here is the article.
Over the last year, air travel with a stringed instrument has grown much more difficult in the United States. Violinists have been left on the tarmac while the plane left, after being denied onto the plane with their violins. Others have had their bows confiscated because they possibly contained ivory. It's stressful and confusing.
Here are some further remarks from a bow-maker:
"Thanks for posting about the current problems with trying to travel internationally with a bow. However, there were a couple inaccuracies in your blog post. First, it is currently OK to travel with a pernambuco bow. The CITES listing is only for raw wood, but a finished bow is OK from a pernambuco standpoint. Second, it would be great if a letter from the maker was accepted by importation officials, but there's no guarantee. It's better than nothing, I suppose, but still agents on the ground may or may not accept it. And while almost all bows made in the last 20-25 years by modern makers like me would have a mastodon tip, there's no way an official can easily tell the difference so your at the mercy of their whims. Third, there's also a species of shell which is subject to import/export restrictions. And so, even though no maker uses this shell, a government agent might decide to confiscate your bow for that. Fourth, the New York legislature is considering a bill which will make it illegal to sell ivory. There is an exception in the law for musical instruments made before 1975, but that still outlaws a lot of bows from being sold. And the New Jersey Legislature this week also passed legislation for signature by Governor Christie that would ban the import, sale, purchase, and possession with intent to sell of any ivory (elephant, hippopotamus, mammoth, narwhal, walrus or whale) or rhino horn, with no exceptions. I'm not sure, but that sounds like a New Yorker couldn't even legally drive across the bridge to play a gig in Jersey with a legally purchased bow which has a mammoth tip. And we all need to start organizing, because the next possible banned substance will potentially be ebony, which is in every musical instrument.
Bowmakers are working to try to find a suitable replacement material which will be easily distinguishable from ivory, yet not ugly as sin. But it needs to be good and stable and glue well to wood, which not all plastic materials will do. But we're trying."
And the profound irony in all this is that harassing musicians and confiscating their instruments will save not one African elephant. Not one! The real purpose of this sort of regulation is to morally reassure if not not glorify those people who think the Correct Thoughts. Protecting endangered species is Good, therefore regulations that punish people who are in possession of ivory is also Good. But most importantly, if I support these regulations then I am a Good Person.
A similar situation obtains with the Department of Homeland Security which harasses innumerable travelers every day and, it is most likely, even at a cost of untold billions of dollars, has not prevented one terrorist attack. Well, maybe one, but the cost/benefit ratio is insanely bad.
When you think of it, there are parts of the US where it is probably safer to travel with a bag of marijuana than with a violin bow containing a tiny amount of ivory...
A picture is worth a thousand words and a video, perhaps more. Here is how airline passengers' luggage might be handled. This video is of Air Canada baggage handlers, but I'm sure they are not unique. This is why your shampoo ends up all over your shirts. Imagine how a guitar would fare. Or a cello...
But don't make me put my guitar in cargo! So many of the anxieties in the career of a performer simply have to do with getting to the gig on time and with your instrument, strings and, in the case of guitar-players, nails, intact. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, many was the time that I would literally smuggle my guitar on board the plane. The possibility of doing this has now, with the added security and, frankly, the sheer disregard of the passengers' needs by the staff, become impossible.
Norman Lebrecht has some of the latest outrages here. Sure, you can take your violin onboard, just remove it from it's protective case! Or pay €300 for an extra seat for an instrument that is easily small enough to go in the overhead. Why are airlines (and customs officers) so difficult to deal with? After reading the second comment to Norman's post, I would definitely try to fly El Al. But since I am retired as a performer, I no longer have to worry about this. Thank St. Cecilia!
My guitar and I have been together for over thirty years. The thought of endangering her by allowing some gorilla to throw her in the cargo hold is just, uh, deeply worrying...
Guitar by Robert Holroyd, Vancouver, 1983
UPDATE: So you can hear what that guitar sounds like, here is my recording of Serões by Isaias Savio:
A while ago I asked for reader's suggestions about future posts and one frequent commentator wrote:
A post about classical music composed for instruments not typically used in classical music (accordions, banjos, harmonicas, you name it).
Yes, there are compositions for the common instruments and ones for uncommon instruments and I suppose I could talk about the uncommon ones. One example that comes to mind is a piece by the Japanese composer Jō Kondō for two guitars tuned in quarter tones and cow bells! He gave me a copy of the score many years ago (subsequently lost, alas!) but I never had the opportunity to give a performance of it. The cow bells add an exotic dimension to a piece that is already rather exotic. Here is a piece for flute and piano by him that might give you an idea of his style:
Then we have the situation where we hear familiar classical music on an unfamiliar instrument. Chris Thile just released an album of Bach solo violin music played on mandolin, but he is getting lots of publicity so let's listen to someone else. How about the banjo:
Well, that was quite nice, but it is probably not going to woo us away from the cello!
The interesting question for me is not whether exotic and unusual instruments can be used in a classical context, of course they can. One piece I have performed a number of times is the chamber opera El Cimmaron by Hans Werner Henze for baritone, flute, guitar and percussion. Everyone gets to play exotic instruments in that piece. The guitar-player alone, in addition to guitar, has to play mbira and a whole bunch of percussion instruments. Here is a photo of one of our rehearsals:
Click to enlarge
You can see that I have to play bongo drums, cowbells, maraca, guiro and in some places gong and thunder sheet. Here is an excerpt from the piece where the players are on their principal instruments:
But the question that I find most interesting is why some instruments have become so widely used and others not. The violin, piano and cello are possibly the most important solo instruments and the orchestra and string quartet the most important ensembles. Why, for example, is the wind quintet so much less important than the string quartet? The simple answer is because composers have written a great deal of very profound music for string quartet and comparatively little for wind quintet. But why is that? Let's ask Rimsky-Korsakov. He writes in his Principles of Orchestration that:
Stringed instruments possess more ways of producing sound than any other orchestral group. They can pass, better than other instruments from one shade of expression to another, the varieties being of an infinite number. Species of bowing such as legato, detached, staccato, spiccato, portamento, martellato, light staccato, saltando, attack at the nut and at the point, down bow and up bow, in every degree of tone, fortissimo, pianissimo, crescendo, diminuendo, sforzando, morendo--all this belongs to the natural realm of the string quartet.
The implication is that wind instruments do not have nearly this range of expressive possibility. The winds are hugely important in the colors and textures they can add to the string core of the orchestra, but they can in no way replace the expressive range of the strings. Similarly, percussion instruments add even more extreme colors and textures to the orchestra, but again are each very limited in their individual expression.
Some string instruments like the mandolin and banjo are also very limited in their expressive range. The classical guitar has probably the greatest expressive potential other than the bowed strings, but it has some pretty severe limitations as well. The piano is interesting because, while it has a huge range of notes and dynamics, it is very limited in other ways. It has no vibrato for example, nor can it execute any of the other articulations such as pizzicato, that the strings can. But it is capable of intricate textures and counterpoint which it manages by mechanizing the production of sound. Indeed, it is this mechanization of sound production that prevents the other possibilities. Of course, 20th century composers overcame this by getting inside the piano and plucking the strings directly or by inserting foreign objects to alter the sound. John Cage's music for prepared piano is the classic example:
Let's end with a sample of musical expression on classical guitar. Just listen to the amazing range of colors and textures that Julian Bream wrests from the guitar in this piece by Granados (originally for piano), La Maja de Goya:
UPDATE: What's an mbira you ask? Another name for it is "thumb piano" and it is an African instrument consisting of a number of metal slats on a resonating soundboard. In El Cimmaron the part is notated exactly. Here is a photo of an mbira:
People who build string instruments like guitars or violins are called luthiers from the French word for 'lute'. Here is a neat little film about how a flamenco guitar is built. I'm not so crazy about the "flamenco fusion" soundtrack, but the film is good.
Perhaps the most innovative classical guitar builder today is the Australian Greg Smallman. Here is a section from a documentary about John Williams where he goes to see Greg Smallman at his workshop to pick up a guitar built for him.
Here is a fascinating little video where a Canadian violin-builder, Bill Sampson from Nova Scotia, explains how the front and back of a violin are 'tuned'.
Carving the soundboard of a violin or guitar is an amazingly subtle and complex skill that builders don't talk about a lot--except with one another.
There aren't many good videos about harpsichord building on the Internet. But here is a pretty good one, though without any technical details. This is Craig Tomlinson from Vancouver:
I can't seem to find a good video about building a lute, so let's end with some really good lute-playing. Here is Nigel North playing music by the English Renaissance lutenist and composer Robert Johnson. Robert Johnson, son of John Johnson who wrote some fine lute duets, is known particularly for his work with that pretty good lyricist, William Shakespeare! He wrote the music for the songs in the play The Tempest, for example.
It is hard for a non-musician to appreciate how horrible is the death of a guitar. Of course, the death of a violin or cello is just as bad (violas, not quite so bad) and much more costly. But since I'm a guitarist, it's guitars that I really mourn.
It's like this: you long for a fine instrument and one day you meet a builder who can make a really wonderful guitar. He chooses his materials carefully. Perhaps he even goes up into the mountains and chooses a high-altitude spruce and has it sawn just so for a tight, even grain. That's important for a fine guitar. Then it's Honduran mahogany for the neck, ebony for the fingerboard and detailing, Indian rosewood for the back and sides. Months of precision craftsmanship and careful design and finally, it is ready and you go pick it up.
Of course as it is a new guitar, its sound is still closed, but months and years of playing not only open out the sound, but also result in a bonding of player and instrument. You can actually train the sound to suit your playing. The soundboard develops partly with age and partly with the kind of sound you make.
And then one day you have to play a concert in a distant city and your beloved guitar is relegated to the baggage compartment. Horrible things can happen... Read this story. Or watch this video:
Some classical guitarists buy fibreglass travel cases that will resist most assaults. Unless you use a forklift! Yes, I have had a guitarist tell me he watched out the window of the plane as they drove the tines of a forklift right through his fibreglass case. And the guitar, of course.
Classical guitars are delicate! The soundboard of mine is so thin that in places the light shines through. Guitarists have a visceral reaction to damage to guitars because they know that often it cannot be repaired. Three of us were standing around talking and a fourth, a student guitarist, was sitting with her guitar on her lap and dropped her tuning fork right onto the soundboard. We all reacted with horror, which she found comic. But it's visceral, I tell you. I can recall slipping on the ice in the winter in Montreal and falling down and twisting in the air so that my guitar would fall on me and not vice versa. And I didn't even think about it.
I usually stay away from current events because I want the posts on this blog to be interesting to read no matter when you stumble across them. But last month I did put up a story about the confiscation of a Guarnerius violin by zealous customs officials in Germany. Here is that post. The latest news from Tokyo is that Yuzuko Horigome will have her violin returned to her as she has submitted the required paperwork. This is good to hear, but I still don't think I will be flying to Germany with my guitar any time soon! You see, I don't have any paperwork. I have owned my guitar for twenty-nine years, but there was no paperwork involved at any time. I purchased it from the builder, who gave me no receipt, nor did I ask for one. I have traveled to quite a few countries in the past, playing concerts and no-one ever asked for any paperwork. What possible documents could be created at this stage?
When society decides to bureaucratize all aspects of life, there are a lot of unintended (or are they unintended?) consequences. Maybe we should question this from time to time. Here is a little Paganini for violin and guitar:
I'll bet you didn't even know there was such a thing as a guitar built by Stradivarius. The late 17th and early 18th centuries were a particular golden era for the guitar and it was a hugely popular instrument in the royal courts of Europe so it was inevitable he would have built some. There are four guitars by Stradivarius still in existence and here is an excellent website with lots of photos.
There are some modern copies that are played by performers specializing in historical performance, but the Stradivarius guitars occupy a tiny position in the modern musical world, compared to their violin and cello cousins. Why is that?
Here is an interesting thing about guitars and violins. The violin top (and bottom, though that is less important) is vaulted as you can probably see in this photo of a Stradivarius violin:
This gives the top a great deal of structural integrity, making for a long life. The top of the guitar, however, is flat. This top, moreover, is twisted by the tension from the bridge. In a modern instrument this amounts to some 125 lbs of torque. After twenty to thirty years, the acoustic integrity of the top starts to go and significant loss of sound is the result.
But the vaulted top of a violin, with a different sort of bridge entirely and supported internally with a bass bar, is far stronger.
True, the guitar also has internal strutting, which does help, but the flat top makes for a short lifespan compared to the violin.
UPDATE [Oct. 28, 2012]: This post keeps being popular so I am updating it by including a musical clip of Baroque guitar. Here are the first four movements of the best-known suite by Robert de Visée (1655 - 1733) including the Prelude, Allemande, Courante and Sarabande. The guitarist is Rob MacKillop and the guitar looks quite a bit like a reproduction of a Stradivarius.
Whenever I see a particularly noxious piece of music journalism, i.e. most of them, I like to comment on it. But the flip side of that is that I also try to give credit where credit is due. There is an interesting story in the Globe and Mail today about an excellent project of the Canada Council: their musical instrument loan program.
Aspiring young violinists have a huge problem trying to find an suitable instrument that most other instrumentalists just don't have. As a young guitarist, just starting to really come to grips with developing my skills as a performer, one of the things I had to do was replace my student guitar (Yamaha, about $200) with a real concert instrument. You can't learn to expand your dynamic and timbral range without an instrument that can actually do it. My solution was I flew to Madrid and purchased a Jose Ramirez 1a (meaning "primera", i.e. top level concert instrument), the same that Segovia and others had played. The cost, in 1974, was a mere $650! I'm not sure what they cost now, but probably somewhere between $5000 and $10,000.
But if you are a violinist, or cellist, you are faced with a problem of a whole different magnitude. What would it cost to purchase a violin of the finest concert quality? Would you believe $4,000,000? Yes, I'm afraid so. So the Canada Council has a wonderful program to help young violinists. Every three years they hold a competition to win the opportunity to borrow a concert violin from the Musical Instrument Bank. There are thirteen violinists vying to possess thirteen different violins ranging from fine instruments worth $300,000 built in the 18th century, to the heights of instruments built by Guarneri and Stradivari! It is hard to find anything wrong with a project like this.
There are some errors in the story. The claim is made that:
in blind tests, audiological analysts and concert violinists alike have had difficulty distinguishing one fine old fiddle from another.
which is not exactly true. The 'tests' referred to were promoted by a builder of new violins who was eager to show that his instruments were just as good as those old ones. Several question marks hover over how the test was conducted and quite a few very knowledgeable people disagree strongly. All the great concert violinists of today prefer to play the old violins built in Cremona and it isn't just because of the name of the builder. But with only some 500 of the Cremona violins still available, and especially with millions of young Chinese violinists coming along, modern builders are striving to build instruments that will measure up to the best of the 17th and 18th century ones.
Isn't it fascinating that the finest violins ever built, so far, were built in a little town in Italy, Cremona, by three builders, Amati, Guarneri and Stradivari, largely between 1700 and 1750? I can't think of any other example of technology of which this is true. Let's hear one of these violins:
Most performers have a close relationship with their instruments. At the highest concert level, a musical instrument can cost as much as a house--or more! My concert guitar is not nearly that valuable, but it is a very fine and unique instrument that I have played for twenty-nine years. It has outlasted one marriage and several girlfriends. Many performers do a great deal of traveling with their instruments and it just seems to get harder every year. It's not the airlines (though they can cause problems as well) so much as the ever-growing complexity and sheer nastiness of the customs, tax and immigration rules. Here is the latest case reported at this link:
Yuzuko Horigome was flying home from Tokyo to Brussels with a stopover at Frankfurt, when German customs seized her Guarnerius violin, worth in the region of one million Euro. They demanded that she pay a fine of 190,000 Euros for the instrument’s release, saying that it had not been taxed properly in the EU. Yuzuko had to fly on without her instrument.
The comments are also worth reading as they offer a wide spectrum of views, several from other traveling soloists. Quite a few people commented that if you don't travel with the "proper documentation" for your instrument then you are just asking for this kind of trouble--especially in the Netherlands for some reason, but also Germany and even the UK. Now I have no idea what the "proper documentation" for my guitar might be, all I know is that I have no papers and never had. Probably nothing would happen if I traveled to Europe with it, but it is hard to know. I have nothing proving I bought it anywhere and it is anyone's guess what it is worth. But I am pretty sure that it is mine and cannot, no matter what kind of tax regime Europe has these days, see how any official has the right to confiscate it.
I'm afraid that stories like this make me even more of a libertarian than I am already. I'm sure that the intricate bureaucracies of Europe and the US have all sorts of reasons for the regulations, taxes and laws that they endlessly promulgate. I'm also pretty sure that the primary beneficiaries of these rules are the bureaucrats themselves. I don't think they have any right to my guitar or a piece of it or Yuzuko Horigome's violin or a piece of it. Though perhaps it is different for her as she is resident in Brussels. But I'm not and under no circumstances would I take the risk of letting state officials get hold of my guitar. Is not their sheer arrogance almost unbelievable?
Here are Yuzuko Horigome and Martha Argerich playing the first movement of the Schumann A minor violin sonata:
UPDATE: Things are even worse for Yuzuko Horigome as a new report indicates that, with fines, the total cost of re-claiming her violin could amount to 380,000 euros or $475,000 USD. There might be some light at the end of the tunnel as this news story reports that
A spokesman for the German authorities has suggested that the violin might be returned if it is regarded as necessary for her job, the Yomiuri said.
I'm afraid that this does not make me inclined to travel anywhere near Germany as I don't want to rely on the arbitrary caprice of customs officers who "might" allow me to keep my guitar.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Now this story is exactly the kind of experience I had on more than one occasion, even though my guitar is not from the 17th century. It is however, just as valuable to me, my companion for twenty-nine years, built by a wonderful luthier from Vancouver who has long since passed away, making it truly an irreplaceable instrument.
I just ran across this piece on Deceptive Cadence about comparing old violins with modern ones. Go read the article, but play the clips comparing the two instruments before going on. What was your conclusion? Mine was that while both instruments sound fine, the second one sounded older because the sound was warmer and more open. This commentor came to the same conclusion:
As a a bassist and composer, I found the test to be rather easy. However, I was not listening for which violin sounded "better", rather I was looking for the warmth of sound that an older violin (not necessarily a Strad)would provide; an instrument that has been vibrating for a long time. The first violin had a nasal quality in the mids that gave away the fact that is was a newer instrument. If you were to ask which I liked better, I would say that either instrumetn would sound wonderful in the hands of a truly gifted player
It really didn't seem that difficult to hear. As a guitarist, I have played a lot of instruments, though none 300 years old! Older instruments have a different, less 'edgy' sound than new ones. So I'm a bit puzzled that the violinists participating in the study were so unable to tell the difference. New instruments are 'tight' and need to be 'played in'. And this is without even getting into the question of the absolute quality of the Cremona builders.
This story just keeps getting bigger and bigger. Now the Wall Street Journal has a piece on the raids on Gibson that includes mention of another atrocity against an innocent importer of some vintage pianos. Yes, of course the keys were made of ivory back then, but since it was legal at the time, the importer was guilty of nothing. So he got off with a mere misdemeanor and $17,500 fine. What!?!
This is absolute nonsense, written by the WSJ in an attempt to undermine our environmental precautions. Any 'classic' instruments that were manufactured before such restrictions went into place, can be readily verified and authenticated through serial numbers (or methods of manufacture, age of finish or hardware.) Not one musician that I know, who is currently an owner of a vintage guitar, has ANY worries about being busted over any of their instruments. This is nothing more than a scare tactic to confuse the issue.
Ah yes, any 'classic' instruments. Like an 18th century harpsichord. What? No serial number? Or a Guarnerius violin from the 17th century. Or my handmade guitar dating from 1983 which originally had an ivory nut. OK, it does have a number: 24. It was the 24th guitar by the maker. He passed away, so no records of manufacture available. I didn't use to worry about being busted, but since these stories I certainly do! I love the US, but travel that involves passage through the US I avoid whenever possible. The law enforcement in the US is out of control, and if you become a "person of interest," you haven't a hope in hell. They will load you with so many supposed infractions that you may well be grateful to get off with a mere misdemeanor and a $17,500 fine. What madness!
UPDATE: I apologize for getting emotional in this post, but the mere possibility of the forces of the state confiscating one's musical instrument is such an unpleasant thought that I over-reacted.
