Vanessa Mae does Vivaldi machinima

In this clip Vanessa Mae does a techno remix of Vivaldi with visuals straight out of a SecondLife machinima - beautifully done

Cheers
Jerry

 

Is blogging a form of busking?

Since starting this blog I have been observing the statistics to see if a single-topic blog would attract more readers than a scattered journal-like blog. What has struck me is that, not only has this blog grown much faster than my Mindsigh one on Lostbiro, but that the stats also provide immediate (okay within a day or so) feedback on whether or not a particular kind of post works better than others.

So what has this to do with music? Well, just like McDonalds is more about real-estate than fast food, so too, blogging is more a form of busking than journalism. How would I know? About thirty years ago when I was learning to play fiddle I campaigned in Adelaide to get busking legalised - and when it was I received busking licence number ten.

The thing about busking is that it is one of the best (and most brutal) ways to learn about performance. I learned about making eye contact with an audience, and about the use of movement and gesture, and about how to structure a performance. All of this stood me in good stead when I subsequently became a full-time musician and my journey into the album charts. Even today the way I work an audience is a direct consequence of what I learned as a busker all those years ago.

Busking gives you direct feedback - people either stop to listen or they don’t. And people either give you money or they don’t and it depends directly on whether or not they like what they see and hear. It is a brutal school in which to learn, but it is also brutally honest. The feedback is continuous, immediate and above all, honest. The audience has no stake in my performance other than what attracts them at that moment.

And I met some amazing people. One violinist gave me an impromptu lesson that improved my tone forever; one evening Itzhak Perlman played my fiddle for an amazing 20 minutes when the Israeli Philharmonic came to town. So the rewards were not always the financial ones.

Back to blogging - the stats show day by day how many people came by, what search terms or tags brought them there, and which posts they open. If I fail to post the stats go down. If I write a boring post the stats go down. But if I post on a popular topic (or a curiosity, like pochettes) the readers come by and have a read. And sometimes they leave a comment - like dropping a coin into the fiddle-case. Piece by piece, post by post I’m learning to write a blog, finding my audience and understanding more about the process of writing as a kind of performance.

Cheers
Jerry

 

Stradivarius - Cool wood

Was it the special varnish? Was it the precision of his carving? What gave Stradivarius violins their special timbre? His varnish has been extensively analysed and although the exact recipe remains unknown, it was basically an oil-based varnish with sandarak (resin), madder root and colorants. But it wasn’t the varnish. Many strads have been badly worn over the past three centuries and most have been revarnished - apparently without adversely affecting their tone.

Stradivarius experimented with several different woods for his violins, but mostly went for spruce and maple - as used today. But his wood was different. At the time Stradivarius was alive, Europe was experiencing a mini ice age with long winters, short summers producing dense annular rings in the trees as they grew more slowly. That is why today the best violin wood comes from cold and semi-arid places - the lack of water makes the trees grow slowly and produce a denser structure. So it is likely we will never see the same timber again - our atmosphere has different pollutants, and our world is getting warmer, rather than cooler.

Drying time - long thought to be a factor, doesn’t appear to be the case. Antonio dated his instruments on completion. The annular ring pattern provides the date the trees were cut down - the difference is the drying time - usually less than 20 years.

But above all, what has struck those who have analysed Antonio’s methods, find that his violins are quite rough inside with varying thicknesses in the top and bottom plates - and perhaps that after all is the secret - by having an infinitely varied fibre length in the timber, every frequency has a chance to ring, along with its respective overtones.

Here is a fascinating insight into the structure of a strad

Cheers
Jerry

Pochette part five - linings

With the glue dry on the ribs it was time to separate the skeletal structure from the mold ready for the next step - lining the ribs with reinforcing strips to provide a greater glue area for the top and back plates.

This is essentially the same process as for the ribs themselves - soak some thin timber strips for about half an hour and then heat up the water pipe in the vise and with the tin backing strip, steam bend the linings at each end - I’m not sure if Neil Gow did it this way or if Antonio Stradivarius used this technique for his violins, but the concept of lining the ribs goes back a long way into the history of violin making.

I then clamped the strips in place against the inside of the ribs to dry so they would retain their shape. I held them in place with clothes pegs and a couple of spring clamps for the ends.

Here are some closer views.

The next step is to glue these firmly in position and clamp again until the glue sets.

After this I’ll shape the end blocks and start work on the top and back plates.

For previous entries on this topic see:
Pochette part four
Pochette part three
Pochette part two
Pochette part one

Cheers
Jerry