Carleen Maley Hutchins
For String Players
Hutchins would like to see her teaching start to reach string players themselves. Her work
has done much to demystify instruments, but most players do not read scientific journals and many
makers are only glad to retain the mystery. She offers the following as important pieces of advice
for players of violin family instruments:[FN 124]
- It is possible for violin makers today, using technical information that's been developed
over the last thirty years, to make fine violins every time. There is no need to pay millions
of dollars to get a good instrument
- It will take some years for an instrument to be "played in"; you can't do it overnight even
though we can shake them up [accomplished by playing a radio station through a speaker
attached to the bridge] and make them sound better temporarily. You can't do it in a
hurry... If you look in the Hill book on the Guarneri family it says that it takes anywhere
from twenty to eighty years to properly season a violin when it's been played fairly
consistently by a good player. Now that says several things. It's the time...it's consistent,
and a good player. I don't think we're ever going to prove this, but I'm almost sure that it
takes a good player to make a really fine sounding instrument because the instruments will
respond to what's being done to them. As I shake them with a radio station, a lot of
yickety-yak comes through at the same time...it's not the same thing as being well-played.
- I think violin players should realize what happens when violins are repaired and restored,
and what happens to them tone-wise, not just box-wise. You know you can make a pretty
box, but you can also louse up the tone rather effectively.
Hutchins has received a number of honors during her long career, including two
Guggenheim Fellowships (1959, 1961), four grants from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for
Music (1966, 1974, 1978, 1982), and honorary degrees from the Stevens Institute of Technology
(1977), Hamilton College (1984), St. Andrews Presbyterian College (1988), and Concordia
University (1992), and the Silver Medal from the Acoustical Society of America (1981). No honor,
however, has ever deterred her from continuing her work, which goes on with continued vigor and
uncompromising standards at the age of 82. In 1993 she was in Baltimore for Yo-Yo Ma's concert
and to the Stockholm International Music Acoustics Conference, and she continues to plan for the
future. Hutchins knows that she has started more projects than she can finish in her lifetime, but in
the end sees herself as part of the history of violin-making and research, a history that is still being
written.
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