Joseph Curtin has written extensively on the art and science of violin making. He is a frequent contributor to Strad and Strings magazines, as well as the Journal of the Violin Society of America Journal, and more recently, VSA Papers. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in the literary journals Paris Transcontinental and Brick.

Antiquing reconsidered

" . . . things were different when the 'Messiah' was varnished. Colours were precious. They were dug from the earth, ground from semi-precious stones and extracted from roots, berries and insects. Recipes for their manufacture were protected by governments, and stolen by spies. The brightly coloured varnishes perfected by Stradivari must have made a vivid impression in a candle-lit court, where servants wore coloured livery and musicians came in by the servant's entrance. But stage lights are harsher now . . ."

"Violinmakers have long relied on rulers, calipers and gages to measure the dimensions of their instruments, but until recently the only widely available tool related to violin sound was the tuning fork. Though the mathematical basis for analyzing sound has been understood since the early 1800s, it was the development of digital computers that made the burdensome calculations feasible - and eventually, trivial. . ."

". . . Hutchins taught us that keeping secrets served mainly to wall in our own ignorance. Better to share our knowledge - or better still, to write it up and submit it to the Catgut Acoustical Society Journal. Not only would we then get credit for our ideas, we would also find out if they happened to be wrong. That is how science works, and that is why, I believe, violin making has progressed so rapidly in recent decades. . ."

Good Vibrations
Signature modes of Old Italian violins & violas - part 2

"In 1680, the year that Stradivari moved into his shop on the Piazza San Domenico, the English scientist Robert Hooke dusted a plate of glass with flour and then drew a violin bow across its edge. The bow set the glass into vibration, and the flour migrated to the areas that were moving least, making visible the patterns of vibration in the plate. Seven years later, Stradivari built the ornamented violin now known as the 'Ole Bull'. . ."

Scent of a Violin
Signature modes of Old Italian violins & violas - part 1

“A perfume, like a violin, is designed to evoke an emotional response.Though the response may vary wildly from one person to the next, the perfume itself can be fully characterised by the essential oils from which it is made. Provided these are known, the perfume – along with its effects on any given individual – can be replicated perfectly. Similarly, the acoustic behaviour of a violin is characterised by a set of resonances known as its normal modes of vibration . . .”

Developing the digital violin

". . . By modifying "Old Italian filters," we hope to learn which acoustical features contribute to Old Italian sound. The question will then become, what happens if these features are further enhanced? If we put electric violins with Strad filters into the hands of some good violinists, will they twiddle the knobs and eventually come up with sounds they like better? Is some kind of Super Strad possible?"

“Before talking about the possibilities for building ultra-light violins, we should first ask: Why would anyone want to build a lighter violin? I remember my teacher Otto Erdesz saying, “I don’t like light violins. They’re like light cameras – they feel cheap.” He was probably only half serious. He often told me, “If you take my advice, you do what you want,” which was a nice thing to hear at the beginning of a career. . .”

Profile of Oliver Rodgers

"One Saturday morning in the 1994, retired engineer and violin acoustics researcher Oliver Rodgers parked his Ford pickup outside the renowned Philadelphia firm of William Moennig & Son. The shop was closed that day, but a violinmaker friend, Pamela Anderson, had spoken about Rodgers with Moennig salesman Phillip Kass. Kass took an interest, came in on his day off, and proceeded to hand over a series of old Italian violins . . ."

Taptones of Old Italian violins

"Hold a violin top between two fingers and tap it, and one or more distinct pitches, or ‘tap-tones’, can be heard. No one knows whether the old Italian makers tuned their plates in any systematic way, yet the tap-tones of their instruments have interested makers and researchers since at least the early 1800s..."

Innovation among violinmakers

"The violin is often hailed as a perfect design - though more often by makers and dealers than by working violinists, who must cope on a daily basis with the imperfections of their particular instruments. Violins - along with violas, cellos, and basses - are easily damaged, expensive to maintain, tricky to adjust, uncomfortable to play in the upper registers, unstable in the face of changing humidity, prone to wolf notes . . ."

“One evening in 1985 at the bar of the Hotel Post in Mittenwald, I met a young German structural engineer. Thinking he might help me better understand the violin bassbar, I unfolded a napkin and drew a line representing a perfectly flat violin top, viewed from the side. 'Let’s say I wanted to design a beam to support a load here . . .' I drew a downward-pointing arrow in place of the bridge .”

Doug Martin's ultralight violins.

"The traditional violin became obsolete in July, 2005. It happened at Oberlin College, Ohio, where thirty-four violinmakers, scientists, engineers, inventors, and blow-hards assembled for the fourth annual VSA-Oberlin Acoustics Workshop. Among the participants was a boat designer and amateur violinmaker called Doug Martin. At first glance, his whimsically designed instruments look like they are built on his knee and held together with bits of electrical tape. Pick one up and you get your first shock . . ."

Bridging the divide - Conversation with Prof. Jim Woodhouse

". . . It's no use coming in and telling makers what to do. Scientific advice should come with a government health warning - may be harmful to your instrument! Science can be useful in sending you in the right direction, but if you follow some theory to the point where you start to think, 'I don't want to do this, but science says I must,' then the science is probably wrong . . ."

"Violinmakers know that tiny changes to an instrument's bridge can make large differences to its sound. In recent decades, researchers - especially Erik Jansson - have shown the importance of the bridge to the violin's treble response (1). They have focused mainly on the bridge's lowest in-plane resonance and the extent to which it effects - or perhaps even creates - the so-called Bridge Hill . . ."

"Alfred Hitchcock used to speak of the MacGuffin in a film, an object one or more of the characters is searching for - the mysterious bird in The Maltese Falcon, for example, or Rosebud in Citizen Kane. The thing about a MacGuffin is that, once found, it is always less than expected. The Maltese Falcon proved to be a worthless statue; Rosebud was just a child's sled. And Stradivari's varnish, that great MacGuffin of the violin world, turned out to be plant oil and tree resin. . ."

Domestic Bliss
by J. Curtin & M. Schleske
Violin Acoustics, Part 4

". . . It is easy to get discouraged by the many obstacles on the way to getting clean measurments, or to fall into a never-ending search for the perfect measurement system. There is no such system. It is simply a matter of finding the kind of workable compromise that allows you to keep moving forward. . ."

Man and the Machine
by J. Curtin & M. Schleske
Violin Acoustics, Part 3
"Most violin shops have a computer in their office. As most computers have sound cards, they stand ready to process audio signals. With the addition of a microphone and about €100 worth of sound analysis software, we now have a workshop tool with the same day-to-day usefulness as a thickness caliper. . ."

A World Apart?
by J. Curtin & M. Schleske
Violin Acoustics, Part 2
"Are there tonal differences between old Italian violins and those built at other times in other places? Can these differences be measured? In the last article (Oct. 2003) we saw that a violin's ability to radiate sound in two particular frequency regions determined its projection. In this article we will examine the concept of frequency response - how it is measured & plotted, & how it can be used to address questions that have haunted violinmakers for centuries."

Can You Hear Me?
by J. Curtin & M. Schleske
Violin Acoustics, Part 1
"Why do some violins carry so much better than others? And what, in acoustical terms, allows them to do this? Let¹s go first to the Rhineland, in Germany, where researcher Ute Loos carried out a series of experiments in a small Dusseldorf concert hall. Loos began by asking six violin students to play a series of unaccompanied scales and musical extracts. . ."

Profile of Martin Schleske

"Early in the winter of 1999, I climb the four flights of stairs to violinmaker Martin Schleske's workshop, atop an elegant building in Munich's historic center. Schleske is a tall, handsome man with green eyes, brown hair, and a broad smile. His assistant Georg Gerl laughs after hearing him speak English with me. "So it is not just in German that he speaks so quickly!"

“. . . A painter friend used to say that all artists have a thousand bad paintings in them, and the only way to get them out is to paint them. I think violinmaking is no different, and the only way to develop flexibility and confidence in the varnish room is to try many new strategies – both good and bad. It is often necessary to re-varnish, and like many of you, I’ve probably gone through more paint stripper than varnish in my time . . .”

Gabriel Weinreich and Directional Tone Color

"When I say I study violin acoustics," says Gabriel Weinreich, Professor Emeritus at the University of Michigan and pre-eminent figure in the world of musical acoustics, "people ask me if I've found the 'Secret of Stradivari.' Well, I suppose it was the instrument's mystique that drew me to it in the first place. Why is it so difficult to make very good violins?"

Building graphite instruments with Charles Besnainou

". . . Can one imagine something better than Itzhak Perlman's Stradivari or Paganini's 'Cannon' 'del Gesu'? From the player's point of view, I think the answer is an easy 'yes'. Make them more powerful and faster responding. Make them more even, less prone to wolf-notes, stable in the face of changing humidity, crack-resistant and, for that matter, less expensive. Anyone who has spent time in the violin world knows that, whether or not the violin is in a Platonic sense perfect, real violins are certainly not. . ."

Redesigning the viola

". . . There is a saying among material engineers that something rebuilt using composites is badly designed if it ends up looking the same as the original. Every material creates its own design problems and opportunities. The traditional violin evolved closely around the properties of the woods used. It therefore inevitable, I think, that the adoption of new materials will send instrument design off in new directions. . ."

". . . If I were to guess in which direction the violin is trying to evolve, I would say, in the same direction as it always has - toward a bigger sound. The lower arching introduced by Stradivari and Guarneri, along with the modern bridge, bow, and setup, have all tended to maximize power and focus. I believe this evolution will continue, if it can, because the forces which originally fuelled it are with us."

"The obvious way to test a violin is to give it to a good violinist, then sit back and listen, just as, I suppose, the obvious way to test a race-car is to give it to a race-car driver and see how fast he can go. The trouble is that race-car drivers can drive fast in almost any car,and good violinists will make almost any violin sound good. It's their job. . ."