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About 25 years ago, I swore off making violins with a Baroque set up because the attitude amongst Baroque violinists was that the appropriate sound of a Baroque violin was that it should be refined, not so loud as a modern instrument, richer in overtones than a modern violin, and easy to play with a Baroque bow. When I heard the sounds that they found acceptable using these above standards, I was completely turned off because what I heard to me sounded insipid, weak, scratchy, and feeble. I did not hear refined,instead I heard sounds that were barely audible at a distance, sound filled with overtones and completely lacking in resonance yielding a scratchy effect when played and wholly lacking in clarity or definition of pitch. That sound filled me with such loathing that I vowed never again to make a Baroque violin.
Since completing my violin acoustical researches in September of 2010, my 30+ year long quest to figure out and understand how the great violin makers from the 18th century managed to make the sounds of their instruments of such a high quality was finally at an end.
In February, I showed some recent violins of my own design during a trip to Europe and violinists were uniformly impressed with the sound of my violin because, as one violinist exclaimed: "it sounds like a violin made in the 17th or 18th century in Italy"! Another said that "though the G and D strings were powerful and impressively rich and resonant, he wasn't sure if the A and E strings were balanced as they felt light to him when playing the instrument", but when he heard the instrument at a distance about 20 rows back in the concert hall, he said: "I take it back, the A and E strings are wanting nothing and are egual, in the hall, to the lower two strings."
During that visit, my brother, Robert Hill, the Director of the Early Music at the Musik Hochschule in Freiburg, Germany after hearing my new violins urged me to reconsider making Baroque violins. When I brought up that old "weak/insipid/feeble/thin attitude" which in the past had so irritated me, he convinced me that because playing Baroque music using period instruments is now so main stream, even Baroque violinists are looking for loud sounding Baroque violins because they are playing in large concert halls and those feeble dinky sounding violins they hankered after back in the 1980s are incapable of sounding credible in large modern concert halls.
Now that I know about enhancing the sound of the violin, I have decided to make Baroque violins again but this time on my terms, confident that players will not turn their noses up at them because they are too loud, too powerful, too singing, and too intense.
However, there is still a sticking point for me about the current attitude/notion among Baroque violinists that there is only one set up for a violin to be called Baroque. Everything I know about musical instrument making tells me that there is the flavor of nonsense about this attitude/notion. Why? You might ask. The fact is there is no such thing as "A Baroque Set up" for a violin. Because, in the 17th and 18th centuries, every maker in every city had his own idea of what the correct set up for a Baroque violin should be. This means that there are hundreds to ways to set up a violin if you lived in the 18th century. Each city had its own set up peculiarities. The set up involving a shorter neck, a thicker neck, a short fingerboard, a scant bass bar, and what is now erroneously called a Baroque bridge are all remnants of the Renaissance as practiced in Cremona. But how these matters were handled and interpreted in Naples, Bresia, Salo, Genoa, Venice, Mantua, Bologna, Rome, Turin, or Milan depended on specific players in those cities, not on the makers themselves. In turn, makers who became famous were using the set up typical in the city from whence they came as suggested by the best players in that city; and then probably from 50 years earlier. As the Art of Playing the violin developed between 1600 and 1800, the violin went through a multitude of set up permutations. It was only after the mid-19th century bravura violinists had their say that the so called Modern set up began to come into focus. Even so, national tastes, individual preferences and bravura performance expectations guided how violins were set up. It was also at that point that violin set up became a craft unto itself and the process of a kind of standardized set up for the violin began to develop.
So when set up is discussed pertaining to Baroque violins, the most important question, I believe, to ask is..."Set up? According to whom?" The set up in Naples was the most advanced, to my knowledge, for bravura playing because the violins of the Galiagno family of makers angled the long necks of their violins back in the "modern" manner and to the same degree and used a tall bass bar as similar in the "modern" manner. This was likely done to make playing high up on the fingerboard easier than the excessively thick neck and fingerboard found on extant Cremonese violins from the same period. So is it justified to call that accommodation to the bravura players in 18th century Naples modern? I think not. Rather, I prefer to call the modern practice of angled back necks and tall bass bars a residual practice handed down from the 18th century Naples violin making set up habits. That this habit came down to us today is probably due to the influence that Nicolo Paganini has had on the violin world. Something similar can be said of every modern set up practice except the use of steel or plastic strings, tuning machines, and the longer fingerboard. Issues of using gut to hold the tailpiece to the endpin are irrelevant because makers have been trying since the invention of stringed instruments to make a tailpiece gut that didn't break because that part of the instrument gets damaged by body oils and sweat from the players.
Exactly what does this mean? It means, I suspect, that the shorter neck was constructed so that thicker strings could be used, thus increasing the tension and boosting volume. The longer fingerboard was used to replace the shorter finger boards when they wore out, much in the same manner that old short octave harpsichords were outfitted with the more useful chromatic keyboards when the short octave keyboards no longer made any sense to hang on to, especially if the instrument was a wonderful sounding instrument. People back then did what was expedient according to what they wanted and didn't care one whit what we in the 21st century might think about it. When they wanted to learn pieces that required the higher notes on the E and A strings, they opted to have the longer fingerboards installed. That is a totally Baroque behavior. Similarly, when players were complaining about the lack of focus on the lower strings, such complaints might have stimulated Mr. Stradivari or Mr. Guarneri or Mr. Guadagnini to place taller bass bars into the instruments for those players. Then, liking the effect themselves, they could have kept doing that.
It also means that the degree of arch on the bridge would change for each individual owner of the violin. Bravura players wanted a lower arch to avoid having to move the bow arm more than a few inches up and down in order to increase the efficiency of their bowing technique. This arch is still the preferred arch among the finest violin players living today. But do we call this a Baroque arch? No. We call it what it is, a concession to the best players of our time. Those who need a higher arch are not superior because they prefer the standard arch of today's standardized set up. And when Baroque violin players today opt for a Baroque bridge with a higher arch, they are not violating the set up practices of the Baroque in doing so.
Likewise, when considering what bridge to use, a modern bridge or a Baroque bridge based on the Renaissance designs, I can say this much. To the best of my knowledge the only existing acoustical justification for the Baroque violin bridge is wholly Renaissance and out of step with the then totally "modern" up to date discoveries and ideas about the overtone series. Whereas, there is very clear empirical acoustical justification for what we know of as the Modern violin bridge. Indeed, I wondered for many years how the modern design for violin bridge could have come into being since there were not clear precedents for it. Then, one day I discovered an acoustical principle which explained perfectly how that design came to be. It was then that I realized that since no violin makers after Guarneri del Jesu had the clarity of acoustical understanding to devise such a bridge, Guarneri had to have been the designer of that bridge. Clearly Stradivari did not design it because we have bridges and patterns by his hand that indicate he was still using the Renaissance models of bridges. This left only Guarneri. And since the design is so clearly specific as to every detail, it must have come from the mind of an acoustical genius. No one else had the acoustical understanding and inspiration to invent it. If that is true as I hold it to be, then the modern bridge is not modern at all, it is through and through a true Baroque bridge because it affords the maximum possible artistic expression. It just happens to be a full blown Baroque conception that came at a time when it wasn't in vogue...much like the piano when it was first introduce to the musical public in 1699. Like Cristofori's conception of the fortepiano and Guarneri's violins, the most acoustically advanced Baroque bridge designed by Guarneri only became current some 60-80 years after it was first introduced.
Thinking in terms of standardization is a modern mental habit which has no place in making or playing of Baroque violins. Baroque violin players need to be clear about what they need to have to make their violin the most comfortable for them to play in order to play their very best. If that means having everything "wrong", then they should have the right to that set up, because, after all is said and done, they are the ones responsible for playing the music and it is enough for them to learn to play the violin and the music written for it and be able to communicate the essence of that music for the enjoyment of the listeners. If they wish to use a shoulder rest or chin rest, the most they need to realize is how the sound may suffer from the weight and clamps on their violin, beyond that the decision should be theirs and theirs alone.
Dogmatic notions of how Baroque violins should be set up are a 20th century mentality. Dogmatic notions about how players ought to play Baroque music is a 20th century mentality. Dogmatic notions about how Baroque violins ought to sound, unless those qualities are of the highest order of sound and artistic judgment, are a 20th century mentality. Since we now live in the 21st century, it is time to set aside those dogmatic notions and embrace a more spiritual attitude, one that is in harmony with the Spirit of the Baroque. And I for one have no interest in the mentalities of the 20th century. I prefer the freedom of decision, which the Soul needs to be revealed and expressed, in the making of musical instruments and in playing musically on the violin or harpsichord, or any other musical instrument, for that matter. And my Baroque violins will be my conception based on my best acoustical knowledge and not some arbitrary notion based on the odd residual artifact lying around in a museum collecting dust.
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