David of Santa Barbara -- Violin Maker David Beard

It's been several years now since my last post.

So far, I've used this blog to share about my research progress.  That work began in 2008 by asking the simple question:  "Can we make a violin today the same way the old Cremona masters did?"

In a sense, the answer to this will always be 'no'.   Neccesarily, this is and will remain the case because the great makers from Old Cremona did not leave behind any explanations of their work process.  Thus, while we can close in and answer parts of the question, while we can learn 'what they did', and while we can learn historically consistent and sensible methods to 'do what they did' once again, yet we can never completely uncover how they thought things through to do their work, nor will we be able to completely reveal some details of classical making, for some details didn't leave sufficient traces in the surviving instruments.

So, there are limits.   Still, we can and have learned a great deal about the old making.   

And, this work of research and revival has passed through multiple stages.

The first stages were to survey the available evidence, historical context, and progress that others had already made in revealing the old Cremona methods 

This kind of research is not science.  It is a kind of historical investigation.  Still, the investigation of the existing evidence can involve science and math to tease out information and understanding.  Some aspects of such study rely on science more than others.   The study of the materials and varnish for example depend greatly on scientific analysis.  In this regard, I've watched the efforts of others with great interest.  Particularly, recent efforts to combine techniques to produce non-invasive non-destructive 3D micro studies of the layering and composition of classical instrument finishes are very promising.  In the coming years, we will have clear information on details of varnishing that for now remain obscure.

In contrast, my efforts have focused on historical context, and the directly observable aspects of the designs and the instruments themselves.  This kind of research can reveal much both about the old traditions of instrument design, and about the work processes of these old masters.  Even regarding instrument finishing and varnish, considerations of the observable final results and the historical context can greatly illuminate the likely processes of the old masters.

The second main stage in my research was to work back and forth between observation and hypothesis to seek descriptions of 'what they did' that applied consistently across the full range of classical example instruments, and not just to one or a few examples at a time.   This has been the main bulk of the research work, and what as mostly been discussed on the blog so far.  'What did they do?'

The third stage of work proceeds in a similar way, going back and forth between hypothesis and observation, but with a different goal.  This third stage is about teasing out an understanding of how they might of accomplished the 'what' we observe in their instruments.   'How did they do what they did?'

We must be humble in such a search.  The only actually provable parts are the observations.  We can look at individual instruments in their current surviving condition.   This is a very significant limitation.  We can look at the curved shapes of an existing example.  We can observe that a particular section of a curve conforms to a circular arc with a particular radius.  We can measure and prove that the current shape conforms to this ideal arc to within a certain error margin.  We can put numbers to these details.  We can go further and hypothesize that this was actually the design idea behind this particular bit of instrument shape.  We can look further by examining the same feature across many similar historical examples.   Perhaps this leads us to conjecture some larger design idea or principle generally used by the Old Cremona makers for that particular feature.   We can test such hypothesized 'principles' or 'traditions' by testing the idea across a large number of examples. You might demonstrate that a particular conception for choosing an arc conforms within a given error margin across 70 instrument examples.  Yet still, we are only hypothesizing.   We can become quite confident that we've found principles that produce the same design shapes seen in the great examples from Cremona, but we can not know if the way we are expressing and thinking about such principles is the same as the old masters.  More likely, we've found re-expressions of principles that share the same 'shape' and results of the old work, but are different in formulation and conception. 

Nevertheless, much can be understood with diligence and care.

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There is a fourth stage to this work: making new instruments in the old ways.  

That original question from 2008 reveals a larger motive driving this research.

       "Can we make a violin today the same way the old Cremona masters did?"

The point is to inform new making today.   The point is to bring these old methods back into the world.

The difficulty is that the research reveals much, but not all.

Doing the work to make instruments is different than observing principles that we can see in the surviving examples.      

Creating a new instrument by reviving these old methods requires making a complete set of decisions.  The research has revealed that the old methods do not rigidly proscribe one right way. Rather, what emerges is a game of many choices, but with traditions or, if you will, rules.   

So, taking this last step requires making choices.  They are highly guided choices, but nevertheless choices, with a freedom among various alternatives at each step.

I’m calling this last stage ‘Cremona Revival’.   I want to acknowledge that new ‘Cremona Revival’ making can never be exactly ‘Old Cremona’ making.  Rather, it is making today, but entirely guided by the traditions and principles observed from Old Cremona examples.

So we have a chain of things:

Research:

Observations  >>>  Hypothesized Principles  >>> Tested and Confirmed Across Many Examples  >>>  Hypothesized  Processes  >>>   Tested and Confirmed

Revival Implementation by Making Choices Within The Observations From Research.

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The traditions and culture of European stringed instrument making developed over centuries and generations.   And, particularly, the cultural that gave us the violin had international reach, but was also regionally focused.  Various towns were centers of making with many makers.  Precursors to the violin developed all across Europe.  But the violin ultimately emerged from some of the Alpine instrument making communities, and particularly developed along the Po river at the foot of the Italian Alps.  We find the origins of violas and very direct precedents to the violin in the town of Brescia, just up the hill from the Po.  By 1533, the music theorist Lanfranco mentions violins and multiple violin makers in Brescia.  And, some time before 1564, Andrea Amati in Cremona is making violin family instruments in a range of sizes.  Over the next approximately two centuries in Cremona, violin making culturally evolved to a peak through the traditions, labors, and learning of generations of makers from a handful of families, all living on one plaza in Cremona.  

'Cremona Revival' aims to recover the old methods and bring this kind of design and making of violins back into the world. The original Cremona making traditions were unified by community, location, and family.  In contrast, a modern Cremona Revival community will need to be global in its physical reality.  But, 'Cremona Revival' will also need to be a community, grounded by a commitment to  making entirely within these recovered old traditions

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 The research is now very significantly complete.  The next task is to make the ideas more public, better known, and more widely understood.

I will focus on videoing the designing and building of a pair of instruments, a violin and a viola.

This will give ample opportunity to show and discuss both the research observations of the old making as seen in the historical surviving instruments, and also the Cremona Revival methods for making instruments today with methods and design principles entirely drawn from the old making.

With the violin example, I'll base the work from Stradivari's PG mould from 1689.   I will show the exact design choices and principles that yield the PG mould design.   Using this mould, I'll then show building a traditional instrument within the Cremona principles.

Simply copying an existing mould design like this is however not in keeping with the Cremona traditions.   I am doing this so that the skeptical can check the ideas I present for themselves, comparing to the existing actual PG mould.

For the viola however, I will work more completely in the tradition and create an original mould design, but entirely within the tradition and by applying traditional principles in making all the design choices. As is seen consistently in classical examples, I will take most of my choices following precedents in other instruments I like, but also by tinkering with some of the choices and details.   For this viola design, I will substantially begin from observations of Andrea Guarneri's contralto violas, and particularly the 1697 Primrose viola.

In an effort to share the results of this work as clearly and fully as possible, I will document the design and building of these instruments with videos on my YouTube 'Cremona Revival' channel, and in this blog.  With the blog, I will try to make the main posts accessible and easily read overviews.  But, for those who desire, I will provide links to more detailed discussions.