Etherial sounds in Phantom Thread
One of the stranger highlights of 2017 was conversation with the brilliant violinist Daniel Pioro about how to create more etherial sounds for elements of Daniel Day-Lewis’s Phantom Thread, an outstanding film with a yet more outstanding soundtrack, but at times it needed a different timbre from what the violin can naturally give. The result […]
Hans Werner Henze’s Viola Sonata
One viola that has beguiled me for years was made by Matthew Hardie in Edinburgh around 1820 from pieces of a seventeenth century viol … more in a forthcoming blog, I want to do it justice. Miraculously the instrument maintains an incredibly strong C-string despite being a mere 15 1/4inches long providing the combination of […]
London’s Oldest Violin Shop?
Cathedral builders have a way of claiming the highest, the longest, the greatest volume, or area to make a claim to be the biggest, or at least the biggest at the time of completion, so semantics can go a long way. But as a unique architectural survival built in 1684, John Carr’s violin shop in the Middle […]
Back at West Dean 2018
A high point in every year is my visit to West Dean College to lecture with the Foundation degree in historic craft practices. This is an enormously challenging group of trainee makers, repairers and conservators in a range of disciplines: Musical instrument, clock and furniture making as well as conservation of books, metal objects, […]
Angliae Notita: John Evelyn’s views on instrument making in Restoration London.
In the late seventeenth century, Edward Chamberlayne produced a series of works entitled Angliae Notita: The Present State of England. In his 1683 survey of London he recorded the views of the diarist John Evelyn to construct a unique picture of the musicians and instrument makers working during the reign of Charles II. Benjamin Hebbert investigates. Edward Chamberlayne […]
The Fortunes of an Eighteenth-century Fiddlemaker’s Daughter: Mary Norman, John Boson and The Sublime Society of Beef Steaks
Sir John Hawkins immortalised the daughters of Barak Norman, one of England’s leading instrument makers of the early 17th century as actresses of the lower class at Goodman’s-Fields. With a tale of a wood carver at the centre of London’s artistic community, Benjamin Hebbert looks a little further into the society she kept. In 1776 Sir […]
Out and about: Violin identification in Newark
Somehow there’s always someone in a lecture who can throw you a question from out of the blue that really makes you think. It’s why it’s such a privilege to give a few lectures each year. In April 2017 I was delighted to visit Newark School of Violin Making to give a whole day of […]
Endangered Species Update March 2018
Over the last year or so, British, European and International regulations on endangered species have been in the spotlight. During the last General Election, following Prince William’s public statements on elephant conservation and ivory artefacts in the Royal Collections, the UK Conservative Party made the abolition of the trade in ivory one of their manifesto […]
Baroque nuts… (not the type you were thinking of).
Neck grafts obliterate all evidence of where the original fingerboard ended on an early instrument, and finding original necks on mainstream violins of the past is a very difficult, making meaningful interpretation hard. Benjamin Hebbert looks at four London-made violins from 1685 to 1740 and explores what the original nut positions can tell us about […]
Three sensational 18th-Century German violins for sale.
I have a very interesting trio of German eighteenth-century violins for sale. Byreputation Ludwig (Louis) Spohr used a violin by Gabriel David Buchstetter for many years after he lost his Guarneri. He worked in Regensburg and is considered as ‘the German Daniel Parker’ because he too was taking influence from Stradivari’s work during the early […]
