Books › Notice of Anthony Stradivari, 1864 › scan 98
Scan 98
Notice of Anthony Stradivari, 1864
4 lines. Read by computer on 24 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1It will perhaps be asked whether Stradivarius made all these experiments. Doubtless, he did not; but it is certain that, since he always arrived at the same results in regard to the quantity of air contained in the body of his instruments, he had observed, from an attentive study of his own productions, that the capacity, both by the curve of the arching and by the height of the sides in relation with the pattern of the violin, should be in certain proportions which he was always able to realize by the marvellous dexterity of his hand. Here, again, be it observed, chance does not uniformly repeat the same effects.
3The f holes in the belly exercise an important influence on the mass of air contained in the instrument. It has been noticed that, when a strip of paper is glued over one of them, the sound of the mass is perceptibly lowered, and the tone of the instrument becomes changed in a remarkable manner. The consequence of this experiment is that, if the holes are too small, the sound of the air will be too low, and the signal defects above-mentioned will declare themselves. If, on the contrary, the holes are too large, the sound of the air will be too high. Such is actually the case in a violin of large pattern by Maggini, the mass of air in which ought to yield a lower sound than that of 512 vibrations in a second, but which, on the contrary, produces a higher sound, because the f holes are larger than those of Stradivarius; this circumstance, however, is an exception in the instruments of that master. It is by such observations as these that we have obtained proof of the
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