Ruggerio Ricci’s “Glory of Cremona”: Helpful Hints on Trying Violins & Bows
Almost every musician looking for a new instrument or bow has a different way of auditioning instruments. Whilst it is clear that there is no standard technique that musicians learn as a student, some received wisdom can be rather indifferent and sometimes counter-productive. In looking for a way of thinking about violin sound, Ruggiero Ricci’s […]
Antonio Stradivari, A Gala Celebration 1737-1987
Touring around the 1987 Antonio Stradivari Exhibition in Cremona. It goes without saying that I was far too young in 1987 to take a trip to Cremona for the legendary exhibition, 250 years after Stradivari’s death. As a student a decade later, one of my most cherished possessions was my copy of Charles Beare’s exhibition catalogue. […]
Nicolo Paganini: George Patten’s 1832 Preparatory Study from Life.
A chance find in a German sale-room proved to be a little better than the auctioneer had suggested… Benjamin Hebbert lucks out. My luck was in one evening, surfing the usual channels and coming across a painting of Nicolo Paganini for sale in a German auction room. In a general paintings sale, although the sitter and […]
Lights show how Heifetz plays violin
In 1952 Jascha Heifetz met with the photograph Gjon Mili for an experiment in capturing the movement of his bow. Published in the 2 June issue of Life Magazine, here are some remarkable photographs. I’m not sure what they tell us about violin playing or about Heifetz in particular, but there is something enchanting about […]
Thomas Smith and the Apollo Belvedere: Neo-Classical violin making in Piccadilly.
As London’s population grew in the early eighteenth century, areas of Westminster between the Royal Palaces and the City of London became increasingly prominent. By the 1720s Piccadilly was one of the most fashionable new areas of London. In a rapidly developing cultural scene that emerged there, one violin head provides unexpected clues into the […]
Ekphrasis, the Paragone and baroque violin playing…
How music should be seen but not heard in paintings, and its implications for understanding musical iconography.
Carl Friederich Abel, Ann Ford and Thomas Gainsborough…. “that” viol revealed.
Every few years viol players in England return with the same question, asking what the viol is in the famous painting of Carl Friederich Abel painted by Thomas Gainsborough. A surprise observation likely provides the answer once and for all. Benjamin Hebbert writes. In June 2019 I travelled to Innsbruck to attend a conference marking the 400th anniversary of the […]
Voller – plain and simple.
The Voller Brothers are famous as forgers and copyists, but their work takes many forms including some relatively ‘straight’ instruments. Ultimately for anyone making a serious judgement about what is and isn’t typical of their work ends up looking through an enormous array of techniques and characteristics of which very few may be detected on any particular violin. This relatively […]
A Superparticular Computer? How viol makers (probably) calculated ratios.
How did sixteenth century English viol makers negotiate the reasonably complex task of negotiating proportional ratios when they made their instruments. Whilst my research indicated that they favoured superparticular ratios that related to the harmonic series, if the task of achieving them was too complex for the Renaissance craftsman, the perceived requirement would throw into doubt my research findings. In […]
An English ‘Da Vinci Code’? MMA 1989.44: An early viol by John Rose in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
During my fellowship at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2005-2006, I pursued a project to understand the design processes of English makers of the viola da gamba. Within this, I found several anomalies, one of which was the viol attributed to John Rose (MMA 1989.44) the famed Elizabethan maker of viols. To my mind […]
