Amongst the great composers, Edward Elgar’s intimacy with the violin stands out. In his compositions he is one of very few to be specific in his bowings, and in his early life his ambitions were focussed towards performance rather than composition. When he began studies with Adolf Politzer in 1877, his teacher believed that as a violinist, Elgar had the potential to be one of the leading soloists in the country. By Elgar’s own account having witnessed the leading virtuosi at London concerts felt that his own playing lacked a full enough tone and so his ambitions evolved towards conducting and ..read more

Barak Norman (1651-1724) is one of the most distinctive and interesting makers of the violoncello, and this is one of the most beautiful examples of his work that I have seen. Norman lived at the same time as Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737) and was certainly the leading instrument maker of his time in London. His earliest works are from the mid-1680s, and in 1690 he established his workshop in St Paul’s Churchyard. The rebuilding of the cathedral after the Fire of London had begun in 1675 and continued until 1710 serving as one of the great wonders of the western world, even as it was being bui ..read more

In the last twenty years François Denis’ Traite de Lutherie has revolutionised the way that we understand the geometry of Cremonese violin forms, but there is no criticism to his work in asking questions about how the fundamental shape of the violin was formed long before Andrea Amati perfected. You can see an animation of the process of François’ method in the video right here. The earliest that we think Andrea Amati was using this kind of geometry must be in the reign of Henry II of France (1536-1559) since there is a fragment of a viola by Andrea Amati that bears his armorial crest. Franço ..read more

A long read: We tend to fall into the idea of Andrea Amati and the invention of the violin as happening in isolation – there was no pre-established tradition of Cremonese instrument making that we know of, and without digging deeper into the cultural world of Cremona in the sixteenth century, it has always seemed that Andrea Amati was an outlier – the kind of qualities that we associate with genius, and the idea not dissimiliar of that of Leonardo, of ideas evolving out of nowhere. I have written an introduction to the artisitic milieu in Cremona in another blog, but here I want to look at the ..read more

At length, I hope to write more on my interest in the lyric and narrative poets of Cremona in the early 16th century, and the profound influence which I believe shaped the cultural acceptance of the city towards embracing Andrea Amati’s new form of instrument, but this blog is more about the painters in Amati’s world, specifically the Campi family of painters, architects, knights and historians, amongst the most accomplished Renaissance men and women of the age (in Cremona, at least). As architects they were certainly capable of appreciating, if not contributing, to Andrea Amati’s designs. As ..read more

The first thing that I would like to do is to wholeheartedly commend the brilliant work of Marie Radepone, Jean-Phillipe Échard and their colleagues for their 2020 scientific paper Revealing lost 16th-century royal emblems on two Andrea Amati’s violins using XRF scanning. Back in 2005 at The Secrets, Lives, Violins of the Great Cremonese Violin Makers, 1505-1744 conference at the then Shrine to Music Museum (latterly, The National Music Museum), the musicologist Raymond Erickson inadvertently revealed a link to the Spanish court amongst the Andrea Amati instruments that have the word Propugnac ..read more

What a delight to see my homage to Larson going viral on the interweb. It’s something I did for a few friends but it escaped and has a life of its own…. What’s the story? The British Violin Making Association ran a professional development restoration course at West Dean College for years, but we discovered that there were no photographs to help promote the course to other makers, so I brought my camera and did a photoshoot during the 2019. The workbench belongs to the college and there is a fine Lockey Hill Cello (London, c.1770) that incidentally belonged to my friends at Philip Brown Violi ..read more

In the age of social media, a reproduction of a nineteenth-century image has been doing the rounds that has caused an unexpected reaction in the immediate environment of the Black Lives Matter protests, taken to be a racist trope between an enslaved African-American and a white slave-owner. As a result it has received censure, being called out as racist, and oftentimes removed from posts because of the narrative that it appears to convey. At length I have decided to write about the scandal and there are two possible reasons that come to mind for doing so. One that comes to mind (in no specific ..read more

Back in 2018, before the pandemic, I attended a meeting in Cremona of many representatives from professional violin and bow making associations around the world with the aim of forming the International Alliance of Violin and Bow Makers for Endangered Species. This was with the aim of discussing threats to our profession from the scarcity of natural resources, and ways to respond to them. These were not heads of industry looking to protect shareholder’s profits, but most of them were individual craftsmen and women who had grown up around the use of wood to make beautiful things that could be ..read more

In the last twenty years François Denis’ Traite de Lutherie has revolutionised the way that we understand the geometry of Cremonese violin forms, but there is no criticism to his work in asking questions about how the fundamental shape of the violin was formed long before Andrea Amati perfected. You can see an animation of the process of François’ method in the video right here. The earliest that we think Andrea Amati was using this kind of geometry must be in the reign of Henry II of France (1536-1559) since there is a fragment of a viola by Andrea Amati that bears his armorial crest. Franço ..read more