Stradivarius Guitars

I'll bet you didn't even know there was such a thing as a guitar built by Stradivarius. The late 17th and early 18th centuries were a particular golden era for the guitar and it was a hugely popular instrument in the royal courts of Europe so it was inevitable he would have built some. There are four guitars by Stradivarius still in existence and here is an excellent website with lots of photos.

There are some modern copies that are played by performers specializing in historical performance, but the Stradivarius guitars occupy a tiny position in the modern musical world, compared to their violin and cello cousins. Why is that?

Here is an interesting thing about guitars and violins. The violin top (and bottom, though that is less important) is vaulted as you can probably see in this photo of a Stradivarius violin:

This gives the top a great deal of structural integrity, making for a long life. The top of the guitar, however, is flat. This top, moreover, is twisted by the tension from the bridge. In a modern instrument this amounts to some 125 lbs of torque. After twenty to thirty years, the acoustic integrity of the top starts to go and significant loss of sound is the result.

But the vaulted top of a violin, with a different sort of bridge entirely and supported internally with a bass bar, is far stronger.

True, the guitar also has internal strutting, which does help, but the flat top makes for a short lifespan compared to the violin.

UPDATE [Oct. 28, 2012]: This post keeps being popular so I am updating it by including a musical clip of Baroque guitar. Here are the first four movements of the best-known suite by Robert de Visée (1655 - 1733) including the Prelude, Allemande, Courante and Sarabande. The guitarist is Rob MacKillop and the guitar looks quite a bit like a reproduction of a Stradivarius.

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A Musical Instrument Bank

Whenever I see a particularly noxious piece of music journalism, i.e. most of them, I like to comment on it. But the flip side of that is that I also try to give credit where credit is due. There is an interesting story in the Globe and Mail today about an excellent project of the Canada Council: their musical instrument loan program.

Aspiring young violinists have a huge problem trying to find an suitable instrument that most other instrumentalists just don't have. As a young guitarist, just starting to really come to grips with developing my skills as a performer, one of the things I had to do was replace my student guitar (Yamaha, about $200) with a real concert instrument. You can't learn to expand your dynamic and timbral range without an instrument that can actually do it. My solution was I flew to Madrid and purchased a Jose Ramirez 1a (meaning "primera", i.e. top level concert instrument), the same that Segovia and others had played. The cost, in 1974, was a mere $650! I'm not sure what they cost now, but probably somewhere between $5000 and $10,000.

But if you are a violinist, or cellist, you are faced with a problem of a whole different magnitude. What would it cost to purchase a violin of the finest concert quality? Would you believe $4,000,000? Yes, I'm afraid so. So the Canada Council has a wonderful program to help young violinists. Every three years they hold a competition to win the opportunity to borrow a concert violin from the Musical Instrument Bank. There are thirteen violinists vying to possess thirteen different violins ranging from fine instruments worth $300,000 built in the 18th century, to the heights of instruments built by Guarneri and Stradivari! It is hard to find anything wrong with a project like this.

There are some errors in the story. The claim is made that:

 in blind tests, audiological analysts and concert violinists alike have had difficulty distinguishing one fine old fiddle from another.

which is not exactly true. The 'tests' referred to were promoted by a builder of new violins who was eager to show that his instruments were just as good as those old ones. Several question marks hover over how the test was conducted and quite a few very knowledgeable people disagree strongly. All the great concert violinists of today prefer to play the old violins built in Cremona and it isn't just because of the name of the builder. But with only some 500 of the Cremona violins still available, and especially with millions of young Chinese violinists coming along, modern builders are striving to build instruments that will measure up to the best of the 17th and 18th century ones.

Isn't it fascinating that the finest violins ever built, so far, were built in a little town in Italy, Cremona, by three builders, Amati, Guarneri and Stradivari, largely between 1700 and 1750? I can't think of any other example of technology of which this is true. Let's hear one of these violins:

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In Memoriam Paul Kling

One of the greatest gifts that the world of music gives to those who become musicians is the extraordinary people you may meet. For me the most remarkable person I met in a life of music was the Czech violinist Paul Kling. I taught at the same conservatory as his wife, Taka Kling, a very charming Japanese woman. We even shared a recital together once. But I was very privileged to come to know her husband. Somehow it was decided that one day we would get together and read some music for violin and guitar--Giuliani, I believe. Now at this time I was already an established artist, a graduate of McGill University with a Concert Diploma in classical guitar and chairman of the guitar department at the conservatory. But this experience was extraordinary as I realized quite quickly that Paul was a truly great musician. I had never played chamber music with someone of his quality before. We ended up doing quite a few concerts together and he asked me to come teach at the university where he was chairman of the School of Music.

He had a great sense of humor. A friend of mine and I were just coming out of a concert by a young Canadian cellist, known for her orgasmic expressions while playing, and when we said something critical he replied, in his distinctive Czech accent, "you were expecting maybe Rostropovich?" A young violinist was auditioning for the performance program--this was at the University of Victoria in British Columbia--and she rather brashly said, "why should I come study here instead of one of the bigger music schools?" He said, "Well, I've been fooling everyone for fifty years, I can fool you too." He used to tell a story about his grandfather and father. His grandfather was a doctor and had a good practice. He was prosperous and had a nice house and some land. Then came World War I and after the war they moved all the borders around and now his grandfather's house was in another country. His father also became a doctor, had a nice practice, bought a house and some land. Then came World War II and after the war they moved all the borders and now his father's house was also in another country. "So I became a violinist."

He told me about studying in Vienna. One day he had an amazing lesson in which his teacher told him the great secret of violin-playing. He was so excited afterwards he walked around Vienna for hours, taking the occasional coffee and pastry in the marvelous coffee shops they have. Finally he got back to his apartment and as he went in he suddenly realized he had forgotten what his teacher said! If you were going on a trip somewhere, to France, or the US or Japan or Brazil, he always knew the best restaurants.

He was a violinist of great accomplishment. At seven he played Mozart and Bach concertos with the Vienna Philharmonic. At nine he was broadcast on Austrian radio. He was concertmaster in Tokyo and Louisville, Kentucky. He toured Japan with Herbert von Karajan playing the Brahms violin concerto. Once I lent him a fine recording of Itzak Perlman and John Williams playing music for violin and guitar and all he said when he returned it was "Perlman always plays sharp." I had a listen, and yes, he was right.

Another good friend of mine, also Czech, told me an amazing story about Paul Kling: he was Jewish and when he was quite young, fifteen years old, he was sent to a concentration camp. In 1943 he arrived in Terezin where he played music under the auspices of a program set up by the SS called Freizeitgestaltung. This did not last too long. In 1944 he was sent to Auschwitz. He never spoke of these things, but my friend, a pianist, knew because her parents had also been in Auschwitz. He had brought his violin along with him to Terezin, of course, but no scores.  He said later on, “I had everything memorized.  And I wasn't thinking of, you know, staying there for a long vacation."


What sort of violinist was Paul Kling? He reminded me of Jascha Heifetz more than anyone else. He once said that every great violinist in the 20th century was either a Russian Jew from the Caucasus or studied with one. On one occasion we were doing a recital together and decided that we would each play a solo piece. I called him up and asked him what he had decided on and he said "the Chaconne". The Chaconne, as opposed to all the other chaconnes, is the last movement of the 2nd Partita for solo violin by J. S. Bach and is not only the greatest piece for solo violin, but also one of the greatest pieces from the Baroque Era. Good heavens, I thought, what could I possibly play? His performance was sheer perfection.


Here is a brief online biography of Paul Kling. And below is a photo taken when we were doing a chamber music series together. Paul is holding his Guarnerius violin.

Paul Kling, Bryan Townsend, Michael Strutt and Lanny Pollet

I have a CD of Paul playing the Beethoven violin concerto that was presented to him when he was awarded the Cross of Honour for Arts and Letters by the President of Austria. But all I can find of him on YouTube is this performance of the Easley Blackwood Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, op 21:

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David Garrett, rock violinist

David Garrett is apparently known for being the "world's fastest violinist", attested to by Guinness and everything. Here he is ripping through the "Flight of the Bumblebee", an orchestral interlude from the opera The Tale of Tsar Tsaltan by Rimsky-Korsakov:

This reminds me of a telephone call I received once from someone seeking guitar lessons. He stated that his fondest desire was to play really fast scales, to which I replied "why"? The conversation went downhill from there as it turned out that his favorite genre was 'death-metal' and I said I doubted I could help him. One thing I said that turned him off was that fast scales are just about the most boring thing in music. OK, let's listen to some more of David Garrett. Here he is playing the Air from the Orchestral Suite No. 3 by J. S. Bach:

He doesn't just play the classics, of course. He also plays a little Metallica:

Should we hear one more, just to get the full picture? I can't quite bear to either listen to or post his mugging of Beethoven, so let's hear the inevitable "Kashmir", originally by Led Zeppelin:

David Garrett seems the ideal crossover artist: he is male-model good-looking, he has tremendous facility and he plays all the usual war-horses, including the new warhorses by Metallica and Led Zeppelin. But he also has that other necessity for real commercial success: no musical expression. I talked about musical expression in this post. There is a lot of music that has a purely utilitarian purpose such as work songs, communal music of various kinds, pure dance music and so on. But most of the music we listen to for aesthetic pleasure involves some kind of individual or group human expression. As Beethoven inscribed on a manuscript of his "Missa Solemnis", "from the heart -- may it go to the heart". Even a halting performance by an inexpert amateur can be genuine human expression. Sometimes, however, in the professional world of music, we hear expression being either neglected or faked. I think that is what is happening with David Garrett. To anyone who actually likes Bach, his Bach is agonizing. The Air played too fast with rock drums? Beethoven put through a blender? On the other hand, Metallica with tender expression? This is fakery and tricks. David Garrett is a male version of Vanessa Mae:

A long time ago a friend and I attended a concert by another crossover artist, a young female cellist who specialized in orgasmic expressions. As we were leaving we ran into another friend, a truly great violinist and we said something critical about the concert. He replied, and you have to imagine this with a Czech accent: "you were expecting maybe Rostropovich"?

There is musical expression and there is something else we might call 'anti-musical' expression--a performance that may amuse or something, but is the very antithesis of real human musical expression. As long as you aren't expecting the real thing. Speaking of:

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Violin Concertos

The piece that really converted me to classical music from being a pop musician was not something by Bach or Beethoven but the Tchaikovsky violin concerto:

To someone whose most exalted ideal of instrumental virtuosity and expression was Eric Clapton, this was quite a revelation! I soon moved on to Debussy, Dvorak and Bach, but continued to be attracted by the expressivity of the violin accompanied by orchestra:

Of course both Bach and Beethoven wrote concertos for the violin. Here is the Bach E-major:

And the Beethoven, which begins, most unusually, with four beats on the tympani:

The violin concerto has endured through four different eras of music history so far, which is an extraordinary thing in itself. Vivaldi wrote innumerable ones in the Baroque:

Mozart added some in the Classical Era:

Brahms and many others in the Romantic Era:

But it was equally popular in the 20th century with a great one by Sibelius:

And another great one by Berg:

Now, in the 21st century, the violin concerto is still going strong with a new one by Esa-Pekka Salonen from 2009 for which he just won an important award:

The amazing longevity of this particular instrumental--well, form isn't quite the right word, nor style--genre?--is that it has proved so adaptable. The structure of the Baroque concerto is quite different from the Classical and so on. In the 20th and 21st centuries entirely new ways of putting together a violin concerto had to be found. But found they were, because the basic idea of a single violinist opposed and in concert with an orchestra is a compelling one that composers never seem to tire of exploring...

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