Baroque stringed instrument makers full#

Baroque stringed instrument makers full#

And there was something about the sound, so sweet, so beautiful, so full of potential even if it wasn’t optimized.Ī month later, as presaged by Robert Seletsky, I was the proud owner of a gorgeous, eighteenth-century viola. The arching, or the curves carved into the top and back were some of the highest (most curvy, you could say) I had ever seen and of exquisite craftsmanship. It was, however, intriguing on a number of fronts. The viola in question had been “modernized” sometime in the nineteenth century, and subsequently “re-baroqued” in the 1980s, but the work of “re-baroquing” it was not excellent, and the instrument was definitely not in its peak sounding condition. More specifically, the term 'lute' commonly refers to an instrument from the family of European lutes. and also extrinsic features, like the strings. A lute (/ lj u t / or / l u t /) is any plucked string instrument with a neck and a deep round back enclosing a hollow cavity, usually with a sound hole or opening in the body. Some of you will know that over the centuries, string instruments have undergone subtle but important changes in what we call their “setup.” This includes physical properties of the instruments themselves, like the angle at which the neck is set into the body, the design and height of the bridge, the design and mass of the tailpiece, etc. Modern and Baroque Violins, Violas and Cellos Aladfi Member TRAINING WORK EXPERIENCE Following this, I assisted Frederic Becker for six years in. What harm could come from taking a look? Off we went to the hotel room where the now-retired but once-legendary dealer and instrument repairer, William Monical, had set up shop. I’m not really looking for a viola right now.” Me: “Bob, I just bought a viola about eight months ago. RS: “Seriously, you need to see this thing now. Robert Seletsky (fine New York accent): “Patrick, come with me. (When I say “encyclopedic knowledge,” I mean it! He is the author of most of the entries on historical violins and bows in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.) In June 1997 I was playing in the BEMF Orchestra, and at the end of one of our opera rehearsals, Robert Seletsky, a long-time colleague and a man with an encyclopedic knowledge of string instruments, was waiting, unannounced, to meet me. It came into my life by a curious route.Įvery other June, Boston Early Music Festival presents a fully staged baroque opera, features many concerts and symposia, and hosts an international exhibition of instrument makers of all sorts: dealers, string makers, publishing houses, you name it, all dedicated to historical performance. My viola was built in 1725 Vienna by Daniel Achatius Stadlmann, a very fine maker, not widely known outside our field, who also made particularly beautiful violas d’amore. I have the great good fortune to play a viola that couldn’t be better suited to that repertoire. I took a ridiculous number of photos, some of which you can see below, and I took my inspiration for the cable patterns in this collection directly from a few of the decorative details I captured.I am particularly interested in the music of the middle to end of the eighteenth century, which is the period that sees the end of what we call the baroque, a flowering of what many refer to as the galant style, and the beginning of the classical era. I still enjoy messing around with songs from this period, but my cats do tend to object.Ī couple of years ago I was fortunate enough to visit Europe for the first time, and one of the big highlights for me was visiting Leipzig and its Bach Museum, churches, and Museum of Musical Instruments. He too built several types of lute-harpsichord. My interest in the seventeenth-century musical world is a long-standing thing - I studied various aspects of it in my university days, which I touched on in my earlier post Why ‘Baroque Purls’? At around the same time I took up playing the viol - badly - before moving on to singing, which happily was a much better fit for me. Johann Nicolaus Bach (a second cousin of Johann Sebastian) was a composer, organist and instrument maker in Jena.