We call violins, violas, cellos and basses a "family" of strings, but they're more like fraternal than identical twins. Each has a distinct timbre that comes through whenever they play as a group.
Creating a family that sounds like one instrument across the whole range, from soprano to bass, was a goal of instrument builders during the Renaissance when the harmonious sounds of vocal music were the ideal. Luthiers (the term for makers of stringed instruments) built "chests of viols"--sets of stringed instruments matched in design and sound to achieve blend and balance.
But with the rise of virtuoso playing during the Baroque and Classical periods, there was a move away from homogeneity and toward individuality; each instrument in a set of strings began to have its own characteristic tone "colors." Enter Carleen Hutchins who has returned to ideals of the Renaissance by working out the complicated engineering and physics needed to design and build sets of violins that blend and balance.
An ensemble dedicated to her work, the Hutchins Consort, a Southern California-based octet founded in 1999 by contrabass violinist Joe McNalley, will play tonight at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.
It took Hutchins more than 40 years to come up with her acoustic formula. "I was just having fun on an experiment," said Hutchins, 90, from her home in Montclair, N.J. "[Composer] Henry Brant called me. He was looking for a violin maker crazy enough to work on the idea," she said.
An amateur string player, she had degrees in education and biology, but learned acoustics from F. A. Saunders, a Harvard University physics professor with whom she began working in 1947. She learned carpentry from friends, and her work as a luthier started as a hobby.
Hutchins took instruments apart, made changes and then reglued the pieces. She and Saunders founded a society that enlisted help from instrument builders, musicians and acousticians.
"We tried everything. We tried making instruments deep and shallow. We were making instruments that we could play."
Was it frustrating? "You believe it," said Hutchins.
A Guarnerius owned by Jascha Heifetz served as a prototype in other forms of analysis. It ultimately revealed to Hutchins the key secret of what makes a violin sound like a violin. Violins have two resonant spots, she said. "We found them in very different places in a viola and a cello."
Calibrating the
Acoustic Formula
