Carleen Maley Hutchins
Teacher

Hutchins's teaching of violin-making has been another important part of her career. Saunders congratulated her on securing her first pupil in a letter of March 9, 1953, and her instructional work continued until the late 1980s. She dates her most active work as a teacher from the late 1960s when three or four persons started to work with her, and she has taught as many as ten students at a time. She taught one or two weekends per month, giving students "hands on" instruction in violin making and tuning of free violin plates. In addition to teaching the basic skills she learned from Berger and Sacconi, she encouraged her students to learn other methods like those taught by German and French masters. A major part of her teaching has been the method she developed of plate tuning with Chladni patterns, a technique that is now in use by violin makers throughout the world. An noteworthy number of her students are scientists and engineers, a tribute to her scientific work. Her fifty or more students have included the following persons (in alphabetical order):

• Alan Carruth, a luthier who lives near Boston, repairing guitars and making arch-top guitars. In Montclair Carruth worked on some of Hutchins's large-pattern violas.

• Joseph Curtin and Greg Alf came to Hutchins as finished makers in the mid-1980s to learn more about her techniques of plate-tuning and mode-matching. They worked in Cremona and now have a shop in Ann Arbor where they are selling copies of Ruggiero Ricci's Guarneri del Gesu.

• Thomas King was an economist in Washington, DC who became interested in violin- making and was a long-time Hutchins student. He has remained active in the CAS, currently serving as an associate editor of the Journal.

• Thomas Knatt studied with Hutchins for about fifteen years and today maintains a shop in Concord, Massachusetts. He works mostly as a guitar-maker and has written articles on the acoustics of the guitar for the CAS Journal.

• Diana Gannett, who was for several years professor of string bass at the Yale School of Music and the Eastern Music Festival in North Carolina and now at the University of Iowa, studied with Hutchins for several years and at one time helped to take care of the octet instruments at Yale.

• Richard Menzel, formerly research director at Lockheed Electronics, studied with Hutchins and now has a violin shop in Livingston, New Jersey. Menzel's care for exact measurement and keen eye for detail has made him a successful string repairman. He also built Hutchins several precision tools to aid in her work. Kevin Jackson, another Hutchins student, works in Menzel's shop.

• Robert M. Meyer, a retired engineer who worked at Pratt-Whitney in Hartford, studied with. Hutchins and has a repair shop in Connecticut where he works on instruments from Yale and the Hartt School of Music. The Hutchins family stops at his house on their way to New Hampshire, and Meyer is active in the CAS, serving currently as a trustee.

• Jeffrey Ovington is a viola-maker working in New York state who came to Hutchins as a finished maker who wanted to learn plate-tuning.

• Deena and Robert Spear are makers in Maryland who have worked extensively with Hutchins for about twenty years. Hutchins describes Deena Spear as a fine intuitive maker who has made some interesting discoveries. She has shown an interest in bringing the work of the CAS to the violin-makers, as may be seen in her article "Achieving an air/body coupling in violins, violas, and cellos: A practical guide for the violin maker" published in the May 1987 issue of the CAS Journal.[FN 123]

• Edward Wall, formerly a professor of physics at Salem University in Massachusetts, studied with Hutchins for fifteen years and now has a violin shop in New Hampshire. He has been active in the CAS, serving as trustee, associate editor and translator of German articles for the Journal.

Hutchins's lecture tours have also been part of her work in education. An especially eventful tour took place in the People's Republic of China in 1982. The Chinese were then trying to develop their violin-making industry (now a lucrative business), and the Ministry of Culture brought her there for six weeks. She gave lecture/demonstrations in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangchow, and also did lectures at the Chinese University in Hong Kong on the same trip. While in China she was approached by a gentleman asking why she was now reporting that Mode 5 on the free violin plates should be at the same frequency in top and backs, when earlier she had written that they should be a tone apart. His latest information, however, dated from before the Cultural Revolution when Hutchins was saying that. He held in his hands the one copy left of a book on the violin he had written before the Cultural Revolution.