RIN:36 THE VIOLIN'S MISSING LINK

The observations which follow are dedicated especially to the generations of artisans who graduated as potential violinmakers, and who -- by conspiratorial design -- were rendered professionally impotent in their quest to become successful practitioners of their chosen métier.

The body of this article, is, in fact, a letter. Though publication was declined, I print it exactly as it was submitted to the editor of The Strad.

2. The letter itself is a response to some of the most publicized pseudo-scientific work on the nature of violins and violin making. The details of Hans Rödig's research, you will learn from the content of the letter. The prefatory point, however, is simple. The importance of what we know as the Rödig effect -- indeed, its very existence -- has been consistently "overlooked." It has, in effect, been suppressed. And, among those who traffic in violins, the same goes for the second law of thermodynamics (the principle of entropy). Most strikingly, this dual suppression -- of the Rödig effect and of the principle of entropy -- has been carried out under the banner of "science." Now, the letter. Not one word has been changed.

July 18,1988
Editorial Department
THE STRAD
Novello & Co., Ltd.
8 Lower James Street
London W1R 4DN
England 01-734-8080

To the Editor:

3. On behalf of our firm, I would like to thank you for publishing a truly fine magazine whose articles cover so many subjects pertinent to the violin and its lore.

4. However, I am perplexed. After reading Carleen Hutchins's "Acoustical Advances" (The Strad, May, 1988), I found myself wondering about the advances mentioned in her title. True, her article had the appearance of serious scholarship. Its substance was another matter. What I actually found in Ms. Hutchins's text was simply a replay of earlier articles -- one, now more than a quarter-century old -- even though the replay had been decked out with some new mythological references. For example, speaking of early and esteemed representatives of the luthier's art, we are told that "some of the more successful ones such as Antonio Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesu surely had absolute pitch and unusual gifts of aural memory." Real inquiry respects evidence. Yet where is the evidence here? What, other than the authoritative tone in which the author speaks, justifies claims which are speculative at best? The conversational tic, "surely" (much like "of course, '"certainly," etc.), is no real evidence. Surely had absolute pitch? Surely!!??

5. Ms. Hutchins seems certain. Sure. Persuaded and persuasive. But does her certainty serve us well? Or does it mislead us regarding serious issues? Indeed, does it keep us from even seeing the actual, non-mythological problems? It has in fact been some 25 years since I first began following Ms. Hutchins's publications and, indeed, entered into correspondence with her. Throughout this time, I have remained perplexed by a fundamental matter. Scientific inquiry has a focus, yet I fail to find any precise focus governing Ms. Hutchins's activity. Over the years, I have repeatedly wondered what quandary this lady seeks to address. What is she after? What genuine question or questions -- i.e., questions not already answered by the abundant, extensively available literature on violin making -- does she hope to illuminate?

6. Which does she seek to answer, a question or a pseudo-question? As I explained in one of my earlier FOCUS REPORT articles ("Finally Found: The 'Secret' of Stradivarius"), Ms. Hutchins -- like other hobbyists of reputedly scientific commitment -- is perpetuating a misleading conception. She would have us believe that mastery of the art and craft of violin making, both its practice and theory, has either been largely lost or not understood by contemporary masters. Her pseudo-problem, then, is to recover the allegedly lost craft -- along with its theoretical basis. And her emphasis falls upon theory. As Ms. Hutchins put it in one of her early, Scientific American articles (November, 1962, p.79):

7. These early masters [Stradivarius and Guarnerius] must have had an open mind toward the little that was known in their time about the physics of sound [i.e., the science of acoustics]. Their successors deserve credit for having lovingly preserved an art, but certainly [sic!] not for advancing a science. In effect they have formed a cult that has been plagued with more peculiar notions and pseudo science than even medicine.

8. And please note Ms. Hutchins' "certainly" -- so similar to the "surely" of 1988!

9. However, the confusions here are more than stylistic. They have to do with the substitution of rhetoric, persuasion, for logic. In consequence, the labors of Ms. Hutchins and her peers are distorted by -- and serve to promulgate -- a philosophical error. This error underlies the delusion that the art and craft of the luthier have been "lost". Let me detail my meaning. Ms. Hutchins, and others as credulous as she, seem to be preoccupied ad nauseam with the scientific investigation of an effect or effects -- namely, the sound or acoustics of violins. In sharp contrast to her method (a method which is "scientific" only in a very special, limited sense) professional violinmakers, starting with the earliest times, have concentrated upon the cause. That is, makers have attended to the mechanics of violins, the instruments' functional and technical aspects which produce the effect. This is a critical difference. For understanding how a violin functions must begin with reasoning from a correct premise. Only mastery of this process of causative reasoning (in both practical and theoretical dimensions) enables one to determine or alter the effect, the actual sounding of an actual instrument.

10. If I sound anti-romantic and anti-mythological, that's because I am. As I put it in an article of my own (the FOCUS REPORT piece mentioned above):

a violin is a utilitarian device, made out of an organic substance (wood), which responds to variable impulses -- imparted by the player through use of a bow -- so as to induce mechanical-pneumatical processes which in turn produce an acoustical effect (sound).

11. Violins, in other words, are machines designed to cause certain effects.

12. I can put the point in more general terms. An acoustical event presupposes a pneumatical event, and this, in turn, a mechanical one. And there is a corresponding order of sciences. Acoustical science, as practiced by Ms. Hutchins and others, is derived from pneumatical physics, and pneumatical physics from mechanical physics or mechanics. Hutchins often talks as though people prior to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had very limited scientific understanding. It would be far more accurate to say that they knew little of Ms. Hutchins' brand of acoustical science -- which is just as well. To the best of my knowledge, acoustics has never enabled a single professional violin maker to build a better violin. So far as professional luthiers are concerned, acoustics is a barren science -- devoid of fruits. Moreover, it is derivative. It borrows its principles from more basic sciences -- namely, mechanical and pneumatical physics. Even more tellingly, mechanical physics was a science quite well understood during Stradivarius' time.

13. We're simply wrong to think of Stradivarius' age as primitive, unscientific, ignorant, and the like. And we're also wrong to think of acoustics as a more important or more "advanced" science simply because it is more recent. Indeed, as we've already remarked, acoustics -- however justified the early enthusiasm for its possibilities -- has been remarkably barren of either fruit or light. What's more, is it worth asking why? Why have acoustically inspired violin making dilettantes and copyists made so little progress as makers?

14. The answer, I would suggest, resides in their fundamental premise -- a premise which has long been significantly incomplete and misleading, even at the time of its original formulation by Savart, von Helmholtz, and others. To cite Hutchins's version of this acoustical principle, narrowed in application to the violin:

15. The sound of a violin depends on the transfer of vibrations from the bowed string through the bridge to the sounding box and its inside air and thence to the surrounding air.

16. This attempt to describe the movement of the bowed string excludes all but two possibilities. It limits itself to two varieties of motion: (1) radial motion or the string's partial turning about its own axis, and (2) lateral motion or sideways vibration, visible to the naked eye.

17. Now Ms. Hutchins has long been convinced that "the reaction of a string to a bow is quite thoroughly understood" (Scientific American, November, 1962, p.83). Presumably, this understanding is especially keen among practitioners of acoustical science. Yet not only is this contrary to the truth -- but she herself seems to acknowledge as much in commenting upon the violin's apparent inefficiency when it comes to translating mechanical into acoustical energy. "Of all the energy that the player feeds into the violin, 1 or 2 percent emerges as sound. The rest goes off as heat."

18. The confusion here has more to do with incompleteness of acoustical science than with anything else. That is, acoustics forces us to assume a vantage point which keeps us from "seeing" something which would, otherwise, be evident to the eye of the mind. Acoustics' initial premise excludes all but two kinds of motion, thereby leading its advocates to claim simultaneously that they well understand "the reaction of the string to a bow" and that violins are so inefficient that their audibility -- their capacity to be heard -- is virtually inexplicable. There's a simple question which needs asking. Why the initial exclusion? Why refuse to consider more than two varieties of motion? Is it even possible that broader considerations would empower us (as we descend from the lofty reaches of acoustics, back down to the firm ground of pneumatics and mechanics) to understand the seeming mystery: when played, violins are audible?

19. I started this part of our analysis by saying that acoustics' fundamental premise was incomplete. Something is missing from the principle(s) used to ground acoustics in general, and Ms. Hutchins' work in particular -- her 1988 publication no less than her article of 1962. To violin strings radial and lateral motion, we must make an addition. We must note that the visible, lateral motion of a vibrating string is indeed the prerequisite to an invisible -- but measurable longitudinal effect.

20. Here, the motion we're speaking of is double. So far as the instrument itself is concerned, there is an actual narrowing of the distance between the two points at which the strings are attached -- this being a direct consequence of the lateral motion. That is, the leverage force created by drawing the bow across the string actually causes the scroll-neck and blocks at either end of the violin's body to tilt inward (there are other sympathetic changes as well). In some ways, setting aside the aspect of strictly sideways leverage, the phenomenon is roughly parallel to what one easily observes in archery -- where the ends of the bow, the tips of the archer's weapon, move visibly closer together as the string is pulled.

21. Turning from the violin proper to the string itself, its lateral motion is complemented by up and down vibrations throughout its length. Among creative violin makers, this longitudinal result -- the narrowing of the two points at which the string is attached -- is spoken of as the "Rödig effect." It is, please note, an effect -- with its name honoring the man who illuminated its cause(s). For it was Hans Rödig who, in his Geigenbau in neuer Sicht (1962), explained in great detail the violin's functional, mechanical, and pneumatical workings. Moreover, it is the full longitudinal effect -- the leverage force generated by setting the string in lateral motion and, thus, powerfully drawing in toward one another the string's end points -- which is the single most potent factor in translating mechanical into acoustical energy. To speak very gently, acoustics tends to ignore all this. Yet when a professional violin maker builds an instrument, issues related to the longitudinal motion are of supreme importance. Adding them to radial and lateral movement makes the "acoustical" premise something quite new -- and newly workable. With its addition, we get a totally different picture of the mechanics of an activated violin. Strikingly, some of the effects we have been exploring are demonstrated by Hutchins' own Figure 5 (see her 1988 article, p. 382). There, she illustrates various bending modes of a violin's neck, corpus, etc. -- though she seems not to understand their cause or causes.

22. In its purest form, the longitudinal effect is strikingly evident when one observes a harp -- since the harp has no bridge, and the strings are directly attached to the resonating box (cf. the archer's bow). Or permit me to provide another parallel drawn from a non-musical situation. If soldiers contradict standard training procedure and march in unison across a bridge, this will cause the bridge to suffer longitudinal oscillation -- waves of up-and-down vibration. There is real danger here, a danger which is not diminished because the most powerful effect is a secondary effect. The bridge may well collapse. But an even more prominent parallel remains, one used to exemplify and clarify the concept of leverage in most textbooks on basic physics. Imagine a car which has somehow rolled into a ditch, and imagine that you are responsible for getting it out. You don't have the strength to simply attach a cable to the frame and pull the auto directly up onto the bank of the ditch. Nevertheless (since this is physics!) imagine the edge as smooth, friction less. You leave one end of the cable attached to the car's frame, while you tie the other end to a sturdy tree. Now the rope is stretched taut from the tree to the edge, and from the edge to the car. And the same person who lacked the strength to pull the car directly up out of the ditch finds that it can be done indirectly. By tugging sideways on the stretch of cable between the edge and the tree, he can exploit the principle of leverage and, thereby, gradually bring the car out of the ditch and onto the bank. The edge of the ditch is much like the violin's bridge. The lateral pull on the cable ("string") generates the leverage force which brings the car closer and closer to the tree -- which pulls the instrument's ends toward one another, angling them in. There is no more telling indicator of the magnitude of the leverage generated by the motion of the violin's strings -- and, perhaps, no more suggestive indication of the reason that the "inefficient" violin's vibrating strings are so unmistakably audible.

23. I ask one thing only. Observe, if you will, that my account is pneumatical and mechanical. It is focused upon causes of effects, rather than upon effects alone. It is emphatically not an acoustical explanation!

24. In conclusion, I would quote Virgil's Georgics: "Happy is he who has been able to learn the causes of things." And on this challenging note, I ask permission to rephrase some concluding words from Ms. Hutchins' 1988 essay. "The research described here has not only made true understanding possible. It is the very research which has facilitated the construction of fine violins, violas, and cellos -- instruments equal and perhaps superior to those revered instruments which, 200 or 300 years ago, were themselves new. Stradivarius, after all, was not an antique dealer. He was the maker of new violins!"

Sincere Best Wishes,
Fritz Reuter, Jr.
Chicago, Illinois U.S.A.

RIN:037	homepage: www.fritz-reuter.com	.
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