Chapter II: Violin Constitution

One of the subtle charms of the violin is that it may be called bisexual.

It unites in itself and welds together the masculine and feminine qualities.

Its very fabric is bisexual. The soft, easily moved vibrations of the swelling front are controlled, checked, and yet excited by the slower and harder pulsations of the maple back. The porous deal and the close-grained maple or sycamore thus thrill together, and each supplies the deficiency of the other, both blending in harmonious and sympathetic union, the ribs welding the back and the belly into an organic whole, whilst the sound-post, poetically called by the French the soul of the violin (_l’âme du violon_), collects the quick and slow vibrations, and fusing them, produces the subtle resultant of violin tone.

That tone is the offspring of neither back nor front, nor ribs alone, but of all these differently vibrating surfaces, collected and made musical in the “soul,” and poured forth as the breath of life from the ∫ ∫ holes as out of the very mouth and nostrils of the violin. Surely the children of the violin are nothing but the sweet and subtly compounded sounds that it utters.

The bisexual figure holds good even to the bow and strings. The bow is the male and the strings are the female elements. They can only vibrate when touched--swept into a tempest of emotion or caressed into tender whispers.

They wait and pine for this magic touch, and long for their own fulfilment. They are so sensitive that they respond to the lightest feathery kiss of the powdered and anointed horse-hair--they murmur, they sigh, they scream, they weep, they laugh, but only when smitten, coaxed or agonised, sometimes almost torn, at others calmly and masterfully swept; whilst the finger-tips, pressing out the vibrations and generating those magnetic thrills which go forth charged with the musician’s very thought and feeling, aid and abet the masculine power of the bow. They are its ministers; without them the might of the bow itself would be impotent; without them the very strings would be unable to yield their infinite variety of tone and inflection of meaning. Yes, certainly the violin is of all instruments the most human, personal, and sympathetic, for the violin is truly bisexual.

It is also a miracle of art, strength, and simplicity--we may say at once, as light as a feather and as strong as a horse. It is composed of thin sheets or slips of wood, only about a fragment of an inch thick; but, by the simplest and soundest mechanical construction, these are so put together as to resist a strain of about a hundredweight upon the belly, neck, and tailpiece, from the tension of the four strings.

Six sycamore ribs and twelve internal blocks and linings suffice to hold the back and belly together.

The neck carries the ebony finger-board and lifts its characteristic scroll or head--so expressive that makers can almost be recognised by its physiognomy.

The neck is let solidly into the ribs and fastened against the lower part of the belly. When firmly glued it is extremely difficult to detach it, and once only in my experience has the neck of a violin proved unequal to support the enormous pull made upon it by the strings.

It was in Ceylon. The heat was intense and moist. I had borrowed a violin for experimental purposes in one of my lectures at Colombo. In the middle of an attempted passage the neck quietly doubled up; the strings fell in a loose cluster. The glue had liquefied, and the whole fiddle came to pieces in my hands. What no time nor wear and tear had been able to effect had been suddenly achieved by the peculiar hothouse, vapour-bath treatment of the tropics.

The early viol-makers no doubt at first selected their wood empirically; but it soon became an established rule to take a soft wood for the belly and a hard wood for the back. If all were soft, the sound would be muffled and tubby; if all were hard, the sound would be metallic and light; neither must the thickness of back and front be uniform--each must be thicker towards the middle, but how thick or how thin must depend upon the relative densities of the wood. The problem was to find the relative densities which would best vibrate together--a cunning connoisseur in timber can judge of these densities even by the feel of the wood. Of course the densities will affect the tone yielded by the wood when set in vibration, and it is difficult to believe that Stradiuarius and his school were unacquainted with some exact technical method of testing the acoustic properties of these woods.

Monsieur Savart’s experiments with specimen strips of Stradiuarius backs and bellies showed that in most cases tested there was the difference of one tone between the belly and the back. A 1717 and a 1708 Strad back both yielded a F♯, a 1724 and a 1690 Strad bellies gave the interval, so that Stradiuarius worked his backs and bellies on some regular principle. On examining specimens of Joseph Guarnerius, it was found that his best were made with only a full tone between back and belly; but occasionally the interval was greater.

The sound-bar is a subtly proportioned strip of pinewood running nearly all the way down the middle of the belly inside. The increasing tension of the modern pitch has made it necessary to strengthen all the old violin sound-bars, as the increasing demands for execution have compelled the lengthening of all their necks.

It is needless to say that the sound-bar readjustment is a delicate surgical operation, more difficult than the substitution of a long violin neck for a short one, for the neck no more affects the tone than the screws in the head. But any blundering with a sound-bar is fatal to the nervous system of the violin; the _wolf_ may suddenly be evolved--that horrid dull growl which sets the teeth on edge, and which, once generated within the violin, is so difficult to diagnose or to cure. The best old masters finished everything inside their violins as carefully as the purfling and the joinings which would meet the eye, and this although a century might elapse before those tiny smooth blocks in the angles, or that carefully-cut close lining of wooden strips fitting neatly to the bellies as a glove to the hand, might chance to be seen at all.

Many forgeries have thus been rudely unmasked, the forger only having troubled to make clean the outside of the cup and platter, whilst within you find the dead men’s bones of his slovenly dishonesty. He worked only to sell, and to sell by deception (not because he cared for his craft or respected his instrument), and his works do follow him! But as Mr Lowell says--

“Men as worked thorough is the ones that thrive,
But bad work follers you as long as yer live;
Yer can’t get rid on it, just as sure as sin,
’Tis allers askin’ to be done agin.”

The finger-board is of black ebony; in the old fiddles it was often inlaid. There need be little said about it except that the old masters would be puzzled to know what a player could want with our long finger-boards, and still more would they have been puzzled could they have heard the extraordinary and complex effects we manage to produce with our extended compass and phenomenal shifts, in spite of the absence of frets to measure intervals.

The FINGER-BOARD must be kept smooth and even, or it will not be possible to “stop” fifths or any other chord in tune. You will notice in old finger-boards the strings have worn deep channels, which of course mar the vibration. The height of the strings above the finger-board is to some extent a matter of fancy, and of course depends on the height of the bridge. A child or young girl would soon be discouraged with attempting to press strings raised too high above the finger-board, and of course the higher you ascend the harder must be the pressure. On the other hand, if the strings are too close down, the touch is no doubt light to your heart’s content; but you cannot get a sufficiently full vibration, and your tone will suffer.

The BRIDGE! I had almost said the asses’ bridge, for indeed thereby hangs a tale. The hard-wood bridge, with its whimsical perforated visage, and its two slender feet clinging closely to the smooth belly of the violin, has been sometimes treated with scant courtesy by writers, and even makers do not all seem fully alive to its importance. I notice repairers will send you back your violin with a bran-new bridge, and no apology, if they happen to have mislaid or broken yours. But the bridge not only exercises the most important and indispensable functions of carrying the four strings under a combined pressure of seventy pounds, but it is in closer and more intimate contact with the instrument than any other of its appendages. It is so squeezed upon the wood as to be almost pressed into it, far more so than the finger-board or the tailpiece, or even the blocks and linings. It is charged with the primary vibrations from the strings and the secondary vibrations of the belly, ribs, and back; nothing goes on in that wondrous air column enclosed in the violin walls without the bridge taking cognisance of it, and possibly hindering or aiding and abetting its successful exit from the sound-holes.

I am aware that I have been thought fanciful in this matter, but an experience of many years has convinced me that it is not easy to get a bridge that suits a violin perfectly, and most dangerous to trifle with the close and _quasi_ marital relations which exist between the violin and its bridge. I dislike new bridges. I love old ones; and why, when all the rest happens to be old, is the bridge alone to bring the raw sap of youth to vex the mellow and desiccated repose of melodious age?

The position of your bridge, like that of your soundpost, the adjusting of your screws, the thickness of your strings, belongs rather to the management than to the constitution of the violin.

The only further details fit to be noted here seem to be the button supporting the tailpiece, which has a character of its own, in its size, material, and fixture; and the far less important tailpiece, to which we may add the purfling and other occasional inlaying.

The TAILPIECE, of course, is strictly indispensable, but it does not much matter what it is made of, or how it is decorated.

The PURFLING, although occasionally resisting damage to the outlying edge, is chiefly ornamental, and consists of three thin strips of wood--two ebony or whalebone, and one of white wood--glued together and inlaid.

In the purfling we have the last survival of the inlaying as applied to musical instruments. You will notice that the further you go back the more elaborately inlaid are the viols and violins. It was thought that the instrument, which was little more in those days of rudimentary music than a toy, might fitly be exploited to show off the conceit of artists and the skill of cabinet-makers; but as music developed and tone was reckoned all-important, every detail likely to interfere with this new development gradually disappeared, till in the hands of the Cremonese makers the faint memory of all the gorgeous mother-of-pearl, ebony, ivory, gold and silver embossing, survives only in the narrow three thin lines of the purfling which strike the contour of the instrument and give piquancy to its form.

And thus the perfect sounding violin, though denuded of all superfluous decoration and meretricious adornment, yet remains a miracle of art--“a thing of beauty and a joy for ever.”