Dave -
(hijacking another thread)
I read the article you linked, and bounced it off my partner Matt. (He's the acoustic luthier of the team, I handle the electrics.) He pinged back with some interesting info I thought I'd pass on:
(GAL is the Guild of American Luthiers; ASIA is the Association of Stringed Instrument Artisans)
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Nic -
It *is* interesting. In the GAL and ASIA worlds, however, Nagyvary's theories are not considered particularly authoritative. There are a variety of excellent articles in the Red Books regarding Cremonese violins, violin graduation, violin voicing, and varnish, and one in particular comes to mind. It's about Stradivari violins, and makes the point that what we hear in a Strad is emphatically not what the builder created - Antonio Stradivari created *baroque* violins, which are *very, very* different from modern violins. Of the 700-odd Strads, all but one or two have been 'converted' to modern specs, which involves at least the following:
- neck angle reset, generally involving a new neck (baroque necks are set very flat by modern standards, and the old scroll is grafted onto a new neck)
- new modern-length ebony fingerboard (baroque fbs are very short by modern standards)
- new bridge (due to neck-set change)
- new tailpiece (cf above)
That's about the minimum. Most of the rest have had the following repairs (which word I use loosely) done:
- replacement of wood due to worms
- regraduation of the top
- doubling of the top (where the top is thinned to .5 to 1 mm and inlaid over a sheet of new spruce)
- large crack fixes (one Strad in a red book article had over sixteen patches covering over seventy-five percent of the top)
In fact, Strad 'cellos were originally a good bit larger than they are now. Many, many many Strad 'celli have been 'cut down' to the modern standard size, removing forever the living document of Stradivari's intentional means of building.
And last, the varnish theory for Strad doesn't hold up, as described by a variety of the articles in the Red Book. For one, luthiers of the time didn't make their varnish any more than we do today (unless we're violin luthiers trying to duplicate an old master varnish). Typically, varnish was provided by an apothecary. The Red Books contain a variety of contemporary recipes documented from primary source material of the time; one of them which is relatively easy to make today is what finish chemist/luthier George Manno calls the 1704 violin varnish. It's a fairly straightforward spirit varnish - seedlac (e.g., dirty, dark shellac) with gum elemi and spike lavender oil added. That way, the shellac finish remains reasonably flexible, which is generally considered desirable for violins.
That's one of two schools....and the beginning of a quasi-religious schism. Some finishers believe that the old masters used spirit varnishes. Some believe they used oil varnishes. Either way, it's not really possible to test - chemical analysis generally shows a thin film coating with various gums/mastics in the finish. Since shellac polymerizes after about a hundred years, it becomes largely indistinguishable from the catalytic scale film created by an oil varnish. So in truth, we'll never know. The two folks in GAL who discuss this in an entirely civil manner are George Manno and Geary Baese....if you search on either name, you'll get extensive hits regarding finish. Both have done a lot of work on pigmenting (Baese's articles on lake pigments are wonderful), violin ground (the finish beneath the finish, as it were) and the varnish. It's worth the time.
One thing, however, that almost everyone in the GAL agrees on: Nagyvary is off base. If you ask some of the luthiers at Healdsburg (I'll introduce you), some of them will suggest he's smoking monkey crack. Others will suggest that Stradivari, a working luthier without a rich patrono, couldn't have afforded the varnish they contend he applied. And some will suggest that there's some crystallization going on between the ground and the varnish (which we've all seen - it's not dissimilar to nitro lacquer gold-haze).
The cold tree thing bears some mention - if there was a little ice age (and there was) that affected the woods, then it would be reasonable to expect that Stradivari's topwood selections would show extremely tight grain (20+ rings/inch) and nearly unbelievable latitudinal stiffness. Typically, this is not the case - the wood has anywhere from 12-20 rings per inch, showing that Stradivari selected wood that he could get. Sometimes it came from the outer bits of the tree which would have had tighter grain, and sometimes not....like everyone else, he used what he could get.
Matt
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nic
