Books › Violin tone and violin makers, 1916 › scan 44
Scan 44
Violin tone and violin makers, 1916
8 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 24. See the scan on archive.org.
1VIOLIN TONE
3assured by an authority of the highest eminence that "tone was the only consideration."
5To hold any other view of tone-creation leads but to confusion. If mechanical construction alone attracted pupils they would certainly acquire all necessary knowledge with the same facility as knowledge is acquired to-day in all branches of mechanical art. There would be nothing connected with the matter that could not be seen with the eye and reproduced with the hand. Even if they failed or were at times careless in the last degree as carvers of wood, we know by the work of Joseph Guarnerius del Gesù, this is no bar to tone.
7Yet we have makers taught by the greatest masters, heirs to their models and, in the case of the sons of Stradivari and Bergonzi, to patterns, tools, wood, and even partly finished instruments, but who still failed to produce the tone of their teachers and fathers. Surely no clearer evidence than this is needed to indicate that it was high ideals alone that placed the masters above others—even their own sons—as poets in tone. Let me repeat that this is no mere theory. Violins are developed to ideals to-day, and I believe it has been done since the days of da Salò by one maker or another. By no other process is it possible to create, as the masters did, a tone
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