Bow & Bridge Violin and bow makers, as the old books printed them

Books › The varnishes of the Italian violin-makers of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and their influence on tone;, 1904 › scan 63

Scan 63

The varnishes of the Italian violin-makers of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and their influence on tone;, 1904

10 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.

1less violent, will produce similar results in an aggravated form.
3As wood which is of a (so-called) mild character, i.e., which contains a minimum quantity of evenly distributed agglutinating matter, will season more quickly than wood which is saturated with some resinous or adhesive substance (often so unevenly distributed as to cause cracks and fissures before the gradual accommodation to strains has had time to be perfected), so may it be expected that the influence of vibrations, in causing dislocation, disintegration, or (to use the expression of M. Savart) destruction of contexture, will be in inverse proportion to the degree of agglutination.
5M. Savart states, as the result of actual experiments, that violins which are unvarnished soon deteriorate in tone. This fact appears to be confirmed by other observers; to my knowledge, the correctness of this observation has never been disputed.
7When due consideration is given to all the observed facts, only one conclusion appears possible: that the deteriorating influence is vibration, which causes a kind of dislocation of the fibrous cells of the wood—they slip or move on each other without much friction or adhesion—individual motion becomes more or less possible. When varnish penetrates the wood so as to produce a practically homogeneous diaphragm, this dislocating action of the vibrations is prevented.
9Most persons who are in the habit of playing on a stringed instrument with a bow will have observed that if a violin, viola, or violoncello has not been played on for some months or years the tone will

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