Books › Violin tone and violin makers, 1916 › scan 115
Scan 115
Violin tone and violin makers, 1916
6 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 93. See the scan on archive.org.
1AND VIOLIN MAKERS
3as the same violin and bow in playing the aria, and that both played in the same hall before the same audience. To what, then, is this difference in tone to be attributed? Is it that one has more experience than the other? Is it due to some virtuosic but invisible touch of bowing or fingering? Or is it that one has a higher conception of tone-beauty? Let us see. Many violinists of long experience are utterly incapable of producing a really beautiful tone from any violin; years of playing has given them a technical equipment, but the results aimed at are not achieved. Furthermore, they can play practically anything, to say nothing of a simple aria, and yet they remain only a degree superior to a fair amateur, so far as tone is concerned.
5Nothing, then, is left to account for this difference save that it is due to ideals. If one player possesses higher ideals than another it seems reasonable to say all his experience and technic will (perhaps unconsciously) be directed towards the expression of them. Thus will tone-beauty be constantly demanded from the instrument, while those without ideals simply play the fiddle, asking for nothing more in the way of tone than that the violin be in tune. We cannot do better in closing this chapter than quote the following from Messrs. Hill's "Antonio Stradivari," p. 162:—
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