Books › Violin tone and violin makers, 1916 › scan 45
Scan 45
Violin tone and violin makers, 1916
6 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 25. See the scan on archive.org.
1AND VIOLIN MAKERS
3characteristic of the maker. No mechanical process will produce this result, whatever else it may accomplish, and however complicated, "secret," or scientific it may be.
5I believe experts agree that the most striking characteristic of the old masters' violins is not simply the grandeur of their tone, but the extraordinary regularity with which this tone was reproduced in successive instruments. It is said that consecutive reproduction of any kind of tone is the most infrequent as well as the most difficult thing in present-day fiddle making. So far as the instrument is concerned, nothing has occurred to make this more difficult to-day than in 1725, when Stradivari, Guarneri, and Carlo Bergonzi were accomplishing their consecutive tonal marvels. The fiddle itself has no secrets which can be hidden. It does not defy analysis, and to add that the mere building of a violin never has given and never will give consecutive tone results, is but to say what is already known and has been repeatedly demonstrated for more than a hundred years. Lest it be supposed that any method is, in itself, a never-failing producer of grand tone, let me say positively it is nothing of the sort. With the highest ideals even the masters did not produce a stereotyped tonal grandeur. A fine tone was, with them, the rule, and a tone of lesser worth the exception—but there were
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