Firsts—First Mountaintop Newspaper
First Mountaintop Newspaper: Among the Clouds Storm-bound atop Mount Washington during the summer of 1874, Henry Burt surveyed the cog railway, the carriage road, the first-rate hotel, post office and telegraph office, and remarked, “There ought to be a newspaper here for those who have to wait for the clouds to lift.” In the July 18, 1877, first edition, postdated July 20, Burt wrote of his passion for the mountains in his opening editorial: “We never feel so near the Infinite as when looking up these lofty mountains and the thousand beauties that are limited only by human vision.” When ...
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Yo-Yo Ma
In 1983, and again in 1992, in separate radio interviews, celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma mentioned that he was enamored of the viola repertoire but was not able to access it via the cello. In 1983, Tom Knatt, student of Hutchins, offered to Ma the Alto Violin—or the “vertical viola”—he had made after the patterns developed by Hutchins. At the time, Ma tried out the vertical viola and later after a few months, wrote a postcard to Knatt saying he “wanted to play it at Carnegie Hall but couldn’t muster the courage.” A decade later, the idea appealed to him in ...
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The Met
At Home at the Metropolitan Museum of Art—a Hutchins Violin Octet and One Lucky Research Fellow In late 1988, Carleen Hutchins donated a Violin Octet to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to honor the 100th Anniversary of the Crosby Brown Musical Instruments Collection. The first exhibition of the Hutchins Violin Octet went on display in the spring of 1989, running March through July of that year. A decade later, a change in administration of the galleries brought the Hutchins Violin Octet out from the catacombs once again—when museum curators asked Hutchins to examine the octet violins for analysis of repairs ...
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The Cover: American Luthier
“Violin” was painted by Walter Tandy Murch (1907-1967), a Canadian-born painter specializing in still life paintings of objects. In it, Murch painted an actual scientific experiment set up by Hutchins in her basement laboratory in Montclair, NJ. The image was first published on the November 1962 cover of Scientific American highlighting the article entitled “The Physics of Violins” by Carleen Maley Hutchins (1911-2009). Murch wrote in an undated notebook: “I think a painter paints best what he thinks about most. For me this is about objects, objects from my childhood, present surroundings, or a chance object that stimulates my interest.” ...
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Serpentine “S”
The serpentine “S” that graces the pages of American Luthier epitomizes the paradoxical nature of the violin-as it echoes the shape of the sound holes carved in the first known violin by 16th century Italian luthier Andreas Amati, celebrated inventor and “father” of the violin. Erroneously known today as “f” holes, the “f” is actually a long, descending, “S,” found in print or cursive writing in old manuscripts. One luthier suggests that these holes took on the shape of an “S” because they were sound holes. In Latin, sound is sonas; Italian, suono; French, son; Spanish, sonido. The sound holes ...
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Octet
The Treble Violin, tuned G-D-A-E, an octave above the violin, is the smallest and highest member of the OCTET. In England it is called the Sopranino following the nomen datum of the recorder family. Its dimensions are approximately those of a quarter-size violin, but in construction it is quite different. In order to achieve the transposed violin sound, the Treble not only has extremely thick top and black plates, but extra large f-holes and strategically placed small holes in the shallow ribs so that its main resonances occur at the desired frequencies. Michael Praetorius projected an instrument in this tone ...
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