THE HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE, WORKING METHODS AND INSTRUMENTS

OF IRA JOHNSON WHITE AND ASA WARREN WHITE

by Mel Higgins

Note: received June 2003 I Gary Sturm

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the following people, in alphabetical order, for their enthusiasm and support in putting together tltis paper on these two very important American violin makers.

David Bonsey, at Skinner Auction, for passing along information on instruments that have passed through the Skinner Auction house, as well as connecting me with Robert Koff.

Robert Koff, for inviting me into his home and sharing with me his beautiful A.W. White viola, one of his CD~s on which he used the viol~ and helping describe the tone and feel of this viola.

Darcy Kuronen, for allowing me to go behind the scenes at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts to inspect the museum's White violins, sharing with me his soon to be published article ''Early Violin Making in New England", and passing along other contacts who would also be helpful for this project.

Ron Midgett, for spending most of his day with me at his shop Easthampton Violin, in Easthampton, Massachusetts, and sharing with me what is arguably the finest collection of violins made by Massachusetts makers. Many thanks, also, for allowing me to use his set~ up for photographing violins.

Gary Sturm, at the Smithsonian Institution, for providing me with a copy of the A.W. White booklel as well as documentation on the White instruments that were featured in the Smithsonian' s 1987 .. An Exhibit of American Violin Makers Before L930".

Chris White, for initial ideas for the paper and urging me to "dig deep».

TABLE OF CONTENTS

OVERVIEW 4

IDSTORICAL SETTING 4

IRA JOHNSON WHITE 6

ASA WARREN WIDTE 9

THE WHITE'S INFLUENCE ON BOSTON'S MUSIC COMMUNITY 13

WORKING METHODS 14

REFERENCES 18

APPENDIX The White Family Tree Ira Johnson White TimeJine Asa Warren White TimeJine 22 Instrument Number and Date for Asa Warren 'White Ira Johnson White Instrument Measurements Asa Warren White Instrument Measurements The Instruments of Ira Johnson White The Instruments of Asa Warren White

20 21

23 24 25 26 27

OVERVIEW

The White brothers, Ira Johnson White and Asa Warren White, have been described as "the first truly professional violin makers in America'' Kuronen, and the "first, though shott­lived, dynasty ofNew England violin making" Gould. The events which brought to prominence the White family include the eventual acceptance of the violin by pwitanical New England and the introduction of classic Italian violins to America. These two events met in time whjch provided the White brothers with both a demand for the violin from the general public and fine quality instruments to copy which elevated the quality of their own product.

ffiSTORICAL SETTING

Although there were makers of stringed instruments in America before the White brothers started making their first instruments, most of what was being made before this time was bass viols and double basses. Violins were not being made due to lack of demand, as the violin was not considered a morally proper instrument to play. Darcy Kmonen describes the public opinion in the 1700's towards music as follows:

Much of puritanical New England maintained a lingering sentiment against instrumental music in general, and many considered the violin's long association with dancing especially damning. But beginning as early as 1780's, and continuing well into the 19u1 century, some New England churches that could not afford an organ began to use a cello to provide instrumental support for congregational singing. With its deep, somber tone. the cello was evidently considered a more acceptable instrument for worship that the sprightly violin.') KuroJl~ .

The use of the cello in the church opened the door for stringed instruments to gain acceptance from the church and, indeed, the general public. As acceptance grew, so did the demand for these instruments. Because 1t was expensive and dangerous to transport these fragile instruments overseas, there were entrepreneurs in New England who started to make cellos of their own. These locally made "cellos" tended to be larger and wider than the traditional cello and was called a bass viol. Local makers also started making a 3-stringed double bass which were also used in the church.

Simeon Snow is credited with making the earliest surviving and dateable violin made in New England, dated March 29, 1779. The instrument was made in Lexington, MA, -according to the label. The person who made this instrument did not have much knowledge of proper proportions or flowing lines as it is described as being roughly made. "The outline is unrefined with long squarish corners, and the arching is rather tlat." Kuronen This instrument was probably only one of a handful of instruments he ever made, if it wasn't the only one.

Benjamin Crehore ( 1765-1831 )~ fi"om Milton, Massachusetts, was the first maker to have produced a sizable amount of instruments in New England. From his workshop, only seven bass viols and nine pianos are lmown to exist. Kuronen It is suggested that this shop made violins, guitars and drums, though no examples of these are known to exist.

Abraham Prescott (1789-1858\ fi·om New Hampshire, had a factory making hundreds of bass viols and double basses, but only occasionally violins. His first bass viol ( 1809) and double bass (1820) were made in Deerfield, NH where he was born. By 1831 , Prescott had moved his shop to Concord, NH where he expanded production and employed as many as six men. A conservative estimate on the total output from this shop is approximately 800 instruments. He was considered to have made only a handful of viO }j ns. Kurouen

Other notable makers of the time include Nehemiah White ( 1788-1850, Williamsbmg, MA, (no relation to Ira or Asa White)), Moses A. Tewksbury (1787-1860, New Hampshire), John Gee Pickering (1804-1858, Greenland, NH), Samuel Brooks (1792-1872, Ashburnham, MA), Peter M. Slocmn (1795-1837, Newport, R.I.), and Thomas Dudley Paine (1812-1895, Woonsocket, R.I.).

The above mentioned makers fall under the category of either bass viol and double bass makers (Crehore, Prescott, Nehemiah White, TewksbUly), hobbyists or amateur makers with little output (Snow, Pickering) or violin makers who were not using modern proportions and construction methods (Brooks, Slocum). Although Paine made over 100 violins, he did not start until he was 73 years of age. Kuronen

It wasn' t until the 1830's that sttinged instrument makers started to concentrate more on violin making rather than bass viol or double bass production. This coincided with the decreased demand for the bass instruments due to the increased popularity of reed organs in the church. At this time, Boston was the cultmal center of the nation and hosted many famed musicians and events. Midgett. This setting lead to an increased interest and demand for violins by the general public. As famous petformers came to play in Boston, they brought with them their fine Italian instruments. Tl:lls allowed the American luthier the first chance to inspect in person a high quality violin which had a dramatic affect on the quality of instrument being produced from this time forward. The Boston area became a leader in new American making, and at the center of all of this was Ira Johnson White (later joined by his brother Asa Warren White) who "pioneered fine professional violin making in Boston." Mid1:ctt Indeed, both Ira and Asa White are "generally considered the

first tiUly professional violin makers in America." Kuronen Their presence was felt for generations in the Boston making scene as their apprentices copied their modern methods and classic Italian measurements to become noted makers of their own.

IRA JOHNSON WHITE

Ira Johnson White (1813-1895), was the fourth of nine children of Arethusa and John White, Jr. Born July 9, 1813 in Barre, Massachusetts and worked the farm with his father and siblings. Ira's father was a local fiddle player of some note and dance master.(Wnll> There have been published accounts that John White, Jr. made the first violin in Massachusetts and that he instructed Ira on making violins, but these stories are untrue. Ira's son, Daniel M. White, tells John A. Gould "John White never made a violin, and never attempted to do any work on one until1864, a short time before he died .. . but the instrument was never finished." Gould

Ira was considered a very good mechanic on the farm, and when things broke down, including f1Jmiture, it was usually Ira who brought them back to life. John A. Gould relates the story of how one ofTra' s relatives, Lorenzo (repotted by Gould to be Ira's uncle, but is more likely Ira's brother, a musician in Boston), brought a broken fiddle to lra to fix. Ira was told that if he could fix it, he could keep it. During his spare time from the farm chores, Ira eventually did fix the violin and was told that it sow1ded better than it ever had. Lorenzo eventually came back to the fann and reclaimed the fiddle, but not before Ira made some patterns from it. Ira wanted to make a fiddle of his own, but his father strongly objected, concerned that his chores would suffer. So, in secret, Ira worked in the attic of the farmhouse, using a piece of old spruce cornice molding for the belly, and the leaf of an old table for the back. Legend has it that as Ira was quietly stringing up the instrument, he happened to notice his father watching him from around the corner. The angry father picked up the instrument to inspect and finally told Ira that he was wasting his time on the farm and that he should go to town (Boston) and make violins. Reportedly. this first instrument was made in 1825weuberg, when Ira was 12 years old. but as there are other errors in this resource concerning the White family, and there are no other records confirming this assertion, it is unclear how reliable this date is.

It has been repozted that Ira then moved to Boston in 1829 to strut work Weut>ers, but he would have been young ( 16 years of age) and there are no records of an Ira White in the Boston city directories until1837. Kuronen A more likely scenario is that he moved to Boston with his family around 1830, when he would have been 17 years old.

To learn the business, one would assumed that Ira would apprentice lmder someone. If so, these makers must have been inconsequential as there is no documentation of their existence or examples of their work wau However~ Edmund F. Btyant, one of Ira's apprentices who became a noted maker of his own later on~ however, relates that the White brothers only training consisted of "their studies of instnunents by the old makers whom they used as their models.••Ayars At any rate, by 1833, at the age of twenty, he was producing professional instruments with a sure hand. An example of this can be seen in Edward Wall' s unpublished manuscript on the White family. wau There is a fine example

of Ira' s early work, a violin fi·om 1835, which is at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Darcy Kuronen, curator of musical instruments at the Boston MFA, indicates that the Jra J. White 1835 instrument "is of the same early pattern developed by White, but also reveals some familiarity with European instruments. The comers are sh01i and rounded off, and the arching is less successful than his later work. The soundholes exhibit a sharp and classically Stradivarian outline at the bottom, but they are rounded at their upper ends. The scroll is probably the best feature, showing a sure hand. White' s early varnish, which is dark brown, has been charactetized by some as trying to imitate the appearance of a tortoise shell .. . The finish does sacrifice transparency for strong contrast, with a great deal of color in the end grain of the spruce belly. Most impoliantly, this early opus is constTucted in the modem manner, with no hint of the older bass-viol tradition." Kuronen

Ira's first shop opened in 1835. Wenberg Again, this resource contained errors regarding the White family, and as this date has not been confirmed by another source, it may be suspect. In fact, it isn 't w1til 1843 that Ira is listed in the Boston city directories as an instrument maker Kurone~', although he had, as mentioned above, made high quality instnu:nents as early as 1833. In I 839, Ira White entered one oflus violins in the second Massachusetts Chruitable Mechru1ics Association in Boston and was awarded a diploma. In 1841 , at the srune competition, Ira was awru·ded a silver medal for violin and viola, and in 1844 he received a silver medal for tenor violin. Finally, in 1856, Ira, joining forces with his brother Asa WruTen White, received a bronze medal for a group of violins and guitars.

City directories list Ira working at 59 Comt Street from 1845 tmtil 1849 with his younger brother James Henry White Kuronen Although brother James did not make violins, he did undertake repair work in the shop. James left the partnet'ship in 1849 to start a shop with his son, also named James Henry White, known as Henry.

In 1850, Ira White then entered into a patinership with younger brother Asa WruTen White, the shop being nan1ed J.J. and A. W WhiLe. Knronen Another source claims that their partnership started in 1848. Wall Their business first opened its doors at 52 Court Street. h1 1853, their business moved to 86 Tremont Street where it stayed in business until 1863. Kuronen The shop was nruned 'fVhit'e Brothers at this second address. An adve1iisement from the 1861 city directory states that the White Brothers were:

lmpmters of musical instmments, French, Gennan & Italian Stdngs of the best quality, Foreign instrumental & vocal music, solos, duos, trios, quartuors, orchestra and choir music. Instruments made, repaired, tuned, bought, sold or exchanged. Bos(on Dircclory

ln 1863, at the age of fifty, Ira White retired and moved to Cedar Street in Malden, where he continued to make instruments out of the comfort of his own horne. At tlus time, Ira was selling his violins for $1 50, twice the amount his brother Asa was receiving for his violins. Around 1871 Ira moved to Upham Street in Melrose where he stayed until his passing in 1895 at the age of 82.00111

d lra Johnson White was laid to rest at Woodlawn Cemetery, in Everett.

It has been reported that Ira White owned a Stradivari violin which he purchased for $1,000 and it was this violin which he used as his model for making. Howe, Wenber~ This idea, however, is refuted by Ira's son, Daniel M. White, who tells John A. Gould that his father never owned a Stradivari and never paid $1,000 for any instrument. Ira did own a Stainer, but this was never used as a model to copy.

Most of Ira's violins were likely modeled after a Stradivari violin owned by Belgian violinist Alexandre Altot, who toured the United states in 1843. In an anonymous letter published in Dwight's Joumal of Music dated December 20, 1856, the mystery writer, who must have known Ira White, asserts:

When the lamented Attot visited tllis country years ago, he brought with him two violins that cost him $3,000, one of them an undoubted Strad in its original state. Being very much pleased with Mr. White's work, he allowed him to measure and copy those instruments, and those measurements have been the basis of Mr. White's work since that time, modified by the various Guameri, Alnati, etc. which have since passed through his hands ... He has made in all80 instruments. Dwighls

Thus, the year 1843 should be considered a critical turning point not only for Ira Wllite, but for the Boston music scene. Not only did Ira's making greatly improve due to Ius exposure to a classic Italian violin, but the local music scene was infused with renewed enthusiasm as virtuosos like Artot came to town. This enthusiasm would lead to more demand for the higher quality instruments whlch Ira White could provide. Not long after Artot visited Boston, Norwegian violinist Ole Bull and Belgian violinist Henry View<temps toured the U.S., further inspiring people to start playing the violin. As these great players came to the United States, so did tlleir old Italian instruments, giving makers a glimpse of what great violins wllich would forever improve their level of making. And as people became more excited about playing the violin, the trade of violin making became a more viable option to eam a living. Luckily for Ira White, he was well placed in the middle of this situation to become the ftrst truly professional maker in America.

Besides the Stradivali model, Ira White also made models of Amati and Guarneri. Jolm A. Gould states that Ira made few Amati modeled violins. Of the two or three that he saw, Gould thought that they were more artistic than anything else he had seen of Ira's work.

The wood that h·a White used to make is violins were almost always American maple and spruce. Ira, like others, looked to use the oldest wood he could fmd for his violins, and thls sometimes came in the form of old fumiture or from demolished buildings. An example ofthis is the wood he used for one of his violins made in 1844. Reportedly, Ira used "wood from an old communion table in the Lexington Street Chw:ch and from other stock taken from parts of the Old Chauncy Street Church. KurOJlen

On hls early instruments, scripted in ink, is his name, I. J White on the outside of the instrument below the button.

The total number of violins made by Ira is not lmown as he did not number his violins. The only reference to his output is by the anonymous letter written to Dwight's Journal of Music which states that by 1856, (the year the Journal was published), Ira had made eighty instruments. This relatively early in his career seeing that he was 43 years of age and that time and it was still almost foti.y years before his passing.

1t should also be noted that ha Johnson White is repmted to be the first person in Boston to make wound strings. wenb~rg

John A. Gould describes Ira J. White as "one of the most interesting and friendly men I ever met. In addition to this enthusiasm and pride in this violin work, he was a great lover of his garden, and up to the last was as bright witted and cheerful as when he was young. His later work was mechanically perfect, and his repai1ing excellent."

ASA WARREN WIDTE

A sa Warren White (1826-1894 ), who went by the name Warren, was born in BatTe, Massachusetts. Born August 8, 1826, Asa Warren was the youngest of nine children born to of Arethusa and John White, Jr., and yotmger brother to Ira Johnson White. Unlike his older brother Ira, Asa Wanen did not grow up on the family farm in Barre. In 1830, at the age of five, Asa Wanen moved to Boston with the rest of his family. Although there is no documentation as such, it would seem obvious that Asa Wan-en White gained an affmity towards violins, as well as an education in the methods of making violins, from his older brothers. By the time Asa Warren would have been old enough to stmt using the tools, his brothers would have already been established in the trade. waH

As for formal training in the business, Asa Warren White apprenticed under N. Giraudot by the time he was seventeen years of age, around 1843. Wall Others cite that he was working for Giraudot (Giradol) at around age twenty. Gould, Howe Giraudot was under the employment of Henry Prentiss on Comt Street in Boston. Edward Wall hypothesizes that, as Giraudot's occupation was listed as guitar maker, that this is probably the trade that Asa Wane11 learned here. John A. Gould states that Giraudot was a vio)jn maker, but this may have been an erroneous statement on his part.

In 1850, Asa Warren White entered into a partnership with older brother Ira Johnson White, the shop being named I.J. and A.W. White. Kuronen Another source claims that their partnership started in 1848. wall Asa Wan·en and Ira Johnson White's business first opened its doors at 52 Court Street. In 1853, their business moved to 86 Tremont Street and changed its name to simply White Brothers where they stayed in business until1863. Kuronen During their partnership, the White brothers not only made violins, but other

instruments including drums and guitars. One would assume that Asa Warren took the lead in the guitar making realm as he had previously apprenticed under a guitar maker.

After the White Brothers store closed in 1863, (and Ira moved to Malden), Asa Warren White opened up his own shop named Tremont Temple Music Store, staying at 86 Tremont Street, the location of the now closed "White Brothers" shop. Kuronun This store catered to all varieties of musical instruments, as demonstrated in the below advertisement:

A. W. White, Dealer and Mfr. of Musical Instruments

Specialties: Meyer Flutes and Clarionets, acknowledged by all, both in Europe and this country to be superior to all others. Sole agent for the U.S.

makers. CoUJtois and Besson Cornets, in Bb with three piston valves. The two most celebrated French

ltajjan strings. Also French and German strings ofbest quality. Guitars of my own manufacture, which prove their quality by comparison with others. Vuillaume and Bausch Violin, Alto, and Cello Bows. Vuillaume Violin, Alto, and Cello Rosin, and all desirable goods in this li.ne. From long experience in the business, I feel confident in warranting satisfaction to every

purchase. JJ Ooo1011 MIUi.:aJ Guide l•ee Wall/iiJ f001nll<e)

He then started a partnership with Louis Goullaud at this same Tremont Street address, changing the name of the business to White and Goullaud. But by 1876, Asa Warren left Goullaud and the Tremont Street shop to again go out on his own at 50 Bromfield Street. Goullaud, incidentally, stayed at the Tremont Street address.

It was an unfortunate circumstance, the death of his wife, Elizabeth Reed, that presumably lead Asa Warren White to relocate to Chicago in 1879. Not much, if anything, is known about Asa Warren's time in Chicago. What is known is that his time there was short-lived, only about eighteen months. In 1881 he moved back to Boston and into the horne of his son Edward. Upon his return, Asa Warren opened a shop at 147 Tremont Street where he owned and operated his business uutH 1888. In 1888, he moved to 633 East Broadway in South Boston where be operated a shop for only two or three more years. In November, 1894, at the age of 68, Asa Warren White died in extreme poverty. wan It has also been reported that he died in 1893. Gould, Wenberg, Henley Asa Warren White is buried in an unmarked grave in the Mount Auburn Cemetery.

Unlike that of his brother Ira. the production of violins by Asa WaiTen is easily documented as he put not only the date, but the instrument number in the instruments he made starting in 1872. There are instruments of his dated before 1872, but how many before this date were made is unclear. However, since 1872, Asa Warren White had made at least 434 instruments, as the last known instrument of his bears the number 434. This prolific output was aided by the apprentices in his shop. If the nwnbers and dates are to believed, and there is no reason to doubt this, than Asa Wan·en White was producing roughly one violin every two weeks. John A. Gould notes that Asa warren "employed several workmen who built up the sides, did the roughing out of the arch.ings, and assisted also in the repairing and carving of scrolls. The finishing and graduating he did himself." Gould

Like his brother Ira, Asa Warren used local spruce and maple for h.is violins. One interesting exception is a violin he made in 1872, number 16, which has a back made of willow. On his earlyinst:run'lents, scripted in ink, is his name, A. W White on the outside of the instnunent below the button. This can be seen on the 1872 instrument, number 16.

The 1876 violin, number 155, at the Boston Museum of Fine A.lts, is of the Stradivari model and is described as "an especially fine and well preserved example of his work. The corners are long and e"A'Ptessive, and the arching, edgework, and wood selection are all superb. Size and proportions are ali con·ect, and the soft, transparent vamish enhances the overall appearance. lnstrwnents such as tlus must have helped set the high standards that the Boston school of violin makers continued to achieve in the twentieth centmy." Kuronen This instnunent also exhibits a feature unique to Asa Warren White instruments. The top of the mortise of the peg box is rounded, instead of the conventional straight line across which ends the mortise. This featme is not seen in his earlier instruments, and it is tmsure why he changed this look. The only other contemporary maker who did this was J.B. Squire (1838-1912).Midgett

By 1868, Asa Wan·en White began importing high-quality violins from Mittenwald, Germany. Kuronen These were unvarnished inshuments which he re-thicknessed, varnished, and sold with a label stating their origin. One of Asa Warren's advertisements in 1883 indicates that he was st111 importing new German and French insh-uments which he would adjust before they were sold. Kuroncn

A sa Warren White, like his brother Ira, mostly made violins of the Stradivari model, and advertised Guarneti, Amati and Maggini models as well. Kuronen The violins he made himself sold for between $55 to $100. Gould Asa Warren sold one of his cellos for $200. Henley His imports from Germany were also mainly of the StTadivari model, and John A. Gould thought that the Mit.tenwald imports "had an affect on his own style, as (John A. Gould) has seen many, which had they been varnished like those of Mittenwald, would have easily passed as such." Gould These German instruments that he imported, regraduated and varnished were sold for $9 (or $13 with case and bow), and the French imports sold for $17 (or $21 with case and bow). Thus it appears that Asa Warren White had varying qualities of violins to be sold at his shop. His best quality instruments would be the ones he made himself, followed by the French and then German imports.

Throughout his life, Asa Wan·en Whlte made mostly violins, but he a lso made several violas, ten cellos, three violas da gan1ba, two violas d'amore, and several guitars. Kuronen

Asa Wanen also had patents for a violin chinrest, a folding 1nusic stand and, in 1887, a violin bow. The bow patent is .interesting as it displayed two to three laminations of wood on the bow to decrease the side-to-side motion of the bow.

A sa Warren Wrute wrote a booklet titled The Violin: Some advice in selecting both the violin and bow. How to Keep them in order. With a classified list ofthe old masters. This thirty six page booklet was publislled in 1875, and revised in 1892 to include a brief description of his violin construction methods as well as violin repair. Although the information on his construction methods is too btiefto be of help to someone who had

never made a violin before, it is informative for someone who is trying to better understand what steps, and in what order, were taken to make and varnish his instruments. The book1et also provides templates, measurements and tools used for the process, all invaluable information for someone trying to better understand how Asa Warren White worked. A desc1iption of his working methods is in the next section.

Asa WaiTen White' s work is of the highest quality and stands the test of time even today. In 1874, Asa Warren entered on ofllis violins in exhibition of the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics Association where he was awarded a gold medal. In 1878, he entered again, for the last time, and won a silver medal. Pictures of Asa WatTen's silver medal winner of 1878, which was built in June, 1877, number 190, are featmed in the Appendix. This violin is currently in the possession of Ron Migett, from Easthampton Violin in Easthampton, Massachusetts, owner of arguably the finest collection of violins made by Massachusetts makers.

One of Asa Warren' s violas, dated June 1875, number 128, is still played today by Robe11 Koff. who has recorded approximately 12 CDs for various recording labels including Columbia, RCA, MGM and Sony. Mr. Koffis noted as a founding member of lhe world­renowned Julliard String Quartet. Mr. Koffused the Asa Wan-en White viola when recording his J. S. Bach Concert, a portion which is found on the CD in the back ofthis paper. Mr. Koff, who used to play on an Andrea Guameri viola, has said that the Asa Warren Wllite is the only vjola he has found since wllich could replace the Guarneri ~ He desctibes the viola as having a "real viola sound; medium dark with an approptiate edge which contributes to projecting the sound. The basic character is rich, melle and warm. There are violas with louder voices but for its size, it possesses the ideal combination of qualities that makes for an excellent instrument." Mr. Koff goes on to explain that the viola «is a very easy instrument to play. The combination of size of the lower bouts, thickness of the neck and response of the instrument contribute to ease of playing." Korr

Another example of Asa Warren Wllite's inst.mments being used al the llighest level is that of one of his cellos, dated 1871. Above the labe] is a handwritten inscription indicating that it was made for August Suck, who was a member of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1881 to J885_Kuronen

1n the end, it should be noted that the myth of the uneducated. rustic. small-town American violin maker is dispelled with Asa Warren White. Not only was he a craftsman of the highest quality, (his instruments winning competitions and being played at the highest level), but he was also an international businessman and inventor.

THE WHITE'S INFLUENCE ON BOSTON'S MUSIC COMMUN1TY

Of the two White brothers, Asa Warren White had a greater influence on the local violin making scene since. at times., he had a larger shop with more people working for him.

·'Many local musicians were employed at his shop as clerks, repairmen, and apprentice flddlemakers."w~J The more noted names that were in Asa Wa1Ten's shop include Calvin Baker, Orin Weeman and Treffle Gervais.

Calvin Baker (active about 1870-1885) Kuronen worked for Asa Warren White for some time, according to John A. Gould. The year he started working with Asa Warren is unknown, but it was after Asa Wanen and Ira Johnson White dissolved their partnership, which was 1863. He was later associated with Orin Weeman, and then left to open his own shop in Braintree where he "devised and built a machine for carving out arches." Gould

These violins made in the machine were of a Stradivari model. The business relationship between he and Asa Wanen White continued even after he left Asa Wanen' s shop as Asa Wan-en would, from time to time, ask Calvin Baker to carve some backs and tops for him using his machine. These Asa WaiTen White violins, with plates roughed out by Calvin Baker, were difficult to distinguish fium Baker' s own violins. Not many of these Asa Warren White/Calvin Baker instruments were made, but are easy to tell from Asa Warren's own violins. "The most obvious difference was the heavier edges characterizing the Baker-assisted instruments." Gouhl Calvin Baker "became one of the more respected mal<.ers in the Boston area'' wall, and his production was estimated to be in the hundreds.

Orin Weeman (1843-1925) came to work in the shop of Asa Warren White after the time of Calvin Baker. John A. Gould writes that Orin Weenl.all started work in the shop around 1872 and stayed there for approximately eighteen months, at which time Asa Wanen moved to Chicago. However, Asa Wan·en White moved to Chicago in 1879, so it is more likely that he was in Asa Wanen White's shop from 1877-1879. Otin Weeman is described as "one of the most accurate workmen ... possessing a keen mechanjcal sense and great dexterity in the use of his tools. His violins show this, the work tlU'oughout being clean and true, but more exact than artistic. His violins always bore a similarity to the earlier work of A. W. White." Gould

Treffle Gervais, born 1863, a native Canadian, came m Boston in 1877 and worked with Asa Wanen White in Asa Wanen's later years. Later, he opened and maintained his own shop in Boston fi·om 1 899 to 1934. wall

One noted violin maker who worked under Ira Johnson White is Edmund F. Bryant, "who later became a respected if not outstanding violin malcer in Boston."wau He had a shop if bis own for about forty years. E. F. Bryant was the uncle ofO.H. Bryant, with whom he had a prutnership between 1905 and 1910. O.H. Bryant would later go on to be one ofthe foremost violin experts in Boston and would open the first violin making school in Boston. wan

WORKING METHODS

Of interest to violin makers are the working methods of certain makers. This is desirable as it can better explain the end result and how this end result was achieved. The information might also offer new ideas or a different perspective on how or when to

undertake a ce11ain step in the making process. Mostly, one must guess at this information through informed study of the final product. The information regarding the working methods of Asa Warren White, luckily, is more straight forward as he wrote a docmnent, however brief, on his construction and varnish methods. The information for Uris section comes, unless otherwise specified, from Asa Wan·en Wllite's 45 page bookJet published in 1892, titled The Violin: How to Construct from Beginning to Completion. White The measurements in the booklet are given in inches and have been converted to the metric system for those used to metric measurements.

The first concern is wood selection. Asa Warren White understood that the older the wood, the better, especially for the belly. He believes that the native (American) spruce was as good as any to be found, and advocated taking it from old buildings that were being torn down. He suggests the same for maple selection. taking it from old furniture if possible.

Next came the design. Asa Warren White' s booklet gives two full-size pattems, a Stradivari and Guemari, giving template outline, ff-hole pattern, plate thickness contour and block layout A half template, made from zinc, was used to scribe the outline onto a flat%" ( 19.1 mm) well-seasoned piece of wood, wllich becomes the internal mold. After mold is cut out and finished, 1" (25.4 mm) holes are drilled out at the proper place which will help in gluing the ribs to the blocks.

The ribs are not to be more tl1an 1116" (1.6 nun) thick. After blocks are glued to the mold, iron clamps are used to glue the ribs to the blocks. It is interesting to note that Asa Warren White tapered the width of his blocks, having the widest part be at the end which is glued on to the mold, and the thinnest part be that which is attached to the Jib. The reasoning for tl1is is tmclear.

Linings are then glued on using common clothes pins which have been modified. A small screw is put through the cloH1es pin wllich, when turned in the correct direction, will tighten the clothes pin ends. After linings are glued in, flatten bottom of rib assembly.

The wood for the back plate should be W' (12.7 mm) thick, which becomes the final arching height. The ribs are then dry clamped to the back plate and the rib assembly is then marked onto the back with a steel point. Use a short pencil, holding it perpendicular to the plate and riding up the rib assembly, to trace on the overhang, or outer edge of the plate. After sawing out the back, finish off with a file.

When plate outline is finished, make the edge thickness 5/32" (4.0 mm). Use a gouge to bring edge height down, but leave the center of the plate untouched. The periling channel is then gouged out. First, use dividers to mark an outline set in 3/32'' (2.4 mm) from the outside edge. This will be the outside edge of the periling channel. Then gouge a channel 1/32" (0.8 mm) deep and ~, (6.4 mm) wide inside the marked line.

One needs only to finish the arch as desired, making a nice transition fi:om the middle thiclmess out to the periling channel. For this, use a small (finger) plane and scraper. Finally, sandpaper the plate thoroughly.

To thickness the plate, Asa Wan·en would consider the hardness of the wood. If the wood is bard and stiff, thickness the back to 5/32" (4.0 mm) in the center. If the back is weaker, increase the thickness to 6/32" (4.8 mm). The thinnest part of the back should be at the outside part of the upper and lower bouts, measuring 2.5/32'' (2.0 mm), and the transition area between the thickest and thinnest area should be 3/32" (2.4 nun).

After the back plate has been thiclmessed, the rib assembly is then glued to the back, and the mold taken out. The rib height is then established, giving the bottom block a height of 1 3/16'' (30.2 mm) and the top block a height of 1 2/16" (28.6 mm). It is not specified if the corner blocks should be the same height as the bottom block, or if there should be a smooth transition from the bottom to top block. Finally, the top of the rib assembly is flattened on sand paper.

The belly is made in much the same manner as the back, except the belly is 1/16" (1.6 mm) thicker. The plate for the belly should be 1 /16" thicker than the back, or 9/16" (14.3 mm) thick, this being the belly arching height. The center of the plate is an average of 1/8" (3.2 mm) thick. Ifwood is weak, add 1/64" (0.4 mm) to thickness. Likewise, if wood is stiff, take away 1 /64" (0.4 mm) from the thiclmess. Graduate to end blocks to 3/32" (2.4 mm) except at outer parts of upper and lower bouts. The lower bout thickness should be 1/64'1 (0.4 mm) less than end block 1hickness, whjle the upper bouts should be l/48" less than the end block thickness. Thus, Asa Wanen Willte made the thinnest prut of the belly the outer parts of the upper bout area. Again, if the wood is stronger or weal(et, subtract or add 1/64" (0.4 mm) to these mlmbers as was done for the center thickness of the plate.

The sound hole templates should be made from thin zinc. It is suggested that the edge of "the zinc be placed at the center line under the diagram he provides for making the outline template. Prick tlu·ough the paper and zinc aJl arOtmd ff-hole. This will provide you with the spacing needed for the ff-holes. Once you place the stop on the belly, put the template on the center line, lay the inside notches on the stop line, and trace ff·holes onto the outside of the belly. Flip template over to locate other ff-hole.

The wood used for the bass bar should be straight grained wood which is frner grained than the belly ru1d as old as possible. It should be 10 W' (260.4 mm) long and 3/16" (4.8 m.m) thick. Fit the bru· to the belly perfectly so there is no strain when they are pressed together. Clamp lightly when gluing.

When closing the box, ve1y thin glue is recommended as the belly may need to be removed at a later time. The box is now closed.

The edges are filed perfectly to conform to the edges. Although not mentioned in the booklet, it is assumed that the edges are now tumed after the box is closed and outline is finalized to match the ribs. Before cutting the channel in which the purfling will sit,

some very thin glue should be brushed around the edge to prevent the marking tool from sinking into the softer parts. Two single cutters are used. After the pw-fling is inserted. scrape and sand paper the area. Finally, cover the violin with wet pumice stone, and when dry use the finest sandpaper until satisfied.

When setting the neck, the distance from the rib to end of fingerboard is 5 W' (_mm). The overstand should be 3/16'' ( 4.8 mm) for a low model, or W' (6.4 mm) for a high model. The fingerboard should be rather wide at the nut, but not over 1" (25.4 mm).

Before varnishing his instruments, Asa Warren White would first stain them with strong coffee, boiling down four ounces of coffee in one pint of water down to half a gill, or as strong as possible. (It is unsure how much a gill is). If a darker color is desired, a little bread soda could be added, but care should be taken as too much soda will make the color dry in streaks. When dry, sand with finest sand paper.

Asa Warren White used Windsor Newton oil colors, one tube bitumen, bumt sienna, carmine, gamboge. If a darker color is desired, add more bitumen. The oil colors are then applied to the instrument, first with a rag, and later with a brush. The description of his application teclmique is unclear, so the exact wording by Asa Warren White is as follows:

The first oil color can be rubbed on with a piece of white cotton cloth or rag, then put on the same color with a bmsh, where you want it, a part at a time. Pat the part painted with the palm of the hand until the colors blend, then do the other parts and pat the same way. You may need a blender for the hoops (ribs).

It appears that he might actually add the colors one color at a time and mix them on the instrument itself, but this is unclear. It is also unclear if he is describing a method of antiquing his instruments. After this process, leave out in the sun for a week or more until very dry. Rub down with cheese cloth or wom out sandpaper and repeat. This process may need to be done a total of tlu-ee or four times before U1e desired color is achieved.

After the desired color is achieved and the instrument is perfectly dry, varnish is then applied. The first coat should be thin. Let the varnish illy completely before adding more coats. Make sure each layer is smooth before applying the next layer of varnish. Each layer should be mbbed smooth with cheese cloth or worn sandpaper. In polishing the last coat, use dentist's fine pumice stone moistened with machine oil.

The bridge should be positioned so that the string length is as close to 12 7/8 (327.0 mm) as possible. For fitting the feet, it is suggested to place a piece of fme sandpaper under the feet of the bridge, abrasive side up, and move the bridge back and f01th across, just enough to cut down the prominent pruis. The proper height ofthe bridge is 1 5/16)) (33.3 nun). Or as a rule, cut the middle of the bridge to 3/16" (4.8 mm) above the fingerboard. The top must be rounded so that the E string is a shade lower than the others. The sides of the bridge then need to be thinned. It was Asa Warren White's opinion that the French bridges, either Aubert or Panpi, were the best.

For suing selection, Asa WruTen White was very particular. He suggests the following:

The E string should be No. 2, C.F. Albert gauge. The A string No. 2 C.P.A. gauge. The D string full or between Nos. 2 and 3. The G string full or between Nos. 2 and 3. Italiru1 strings are much the best, especially the A, D and G. The best German strings are used for the E as they are much stronger.

REFERENCES

Ayarsj Christine Merrie~ Contributions to the Art of Music in America by the Music Industries ofBoston, 1640-1936, Boston, The H.W. Wilson Company, 1937.

Boston Directory, 1861, advertising section.

Dwight's Journal of Music , December 20, 1856. pp 90-91.

Gould, John A., "The Early Violin Makers ofNew England ", Journal of the Violin Society of America, Volutne 16, No. 1, 1999, pp 3-76.

Henley, William, Universal Dictionary of Violin and Bow Makers, Brighton, Amati Publishing Ltd., 1959.

Howe, William H., "Early American Violin Makers", The Violinist 's Guide, Volume 20, No.7, July 1916, pp.15-18.

Koff, Robert, private conversations and em ails, 2001.

Kuronen, Darcy, "Early Violin Making in New England", Boston, 2001, cwTenUy unpublished.

Midgett, Ron, personal conversations, 2002, and Ron .tv1igett' s Easthampton Violin website brtp://www.worldinmotion.com/easthamptonviolin/museumexhibit.htm.

Wall , Edward> The JohYJ., White Family in the Boston Musical Scene, 1829 - 1935, Salem, Massachusetts, copyright by author, 1978, currently unpublished. 1

Wenberg, Thomas, Dictionary of American Violin Makers, Mt. Hood, Oregon, Mt. Hood Publishin.g Company, 1986. ·

White, A.W.;The Violfn: How to Construct from Beginning to Completion, Boston, MassachuSetts, Press of'the Inquirer, 1892.

•:,

APPENDIX

John White, Jr. (1785-1869) farmer, shoemaker, musician married Arethusa Holden

r r

....

...

The White Family Tree

Lorenzo ( 1808-1834) Musician and portrait

painter

Eliza H. (1809-1887)

John M (1811- ?) singer and band leader

Ira Johnson (1813-1895) violin maker

Silas (1815_-_?._) ___ _, '\ I

Eugene A. (1834-1887) musician and music

stand maker

Ira Erving (1839-1914) bass player and repairman

Daniel Maling (1847-1935) pia'no manufacturer

Lorenzo (183T; .. Hl1M c)f3rinetist .

James Henry (1817-1882) .-. '. . '. _ . . 1

violinist ~mp repairman L,._ __ ....:.·_' ·James Henry (1844-1~20) ·

Mary A. (1~4~.-1 ·862)

marrj~d John A. Evans, instrument maker

Charles ( 1822 -1827)

Asa Warren (1826-1894) violin maker

repairman• ·'

' : .,'\• ~ I, ...

Edward Warren (1849-1896) repairman

Taken from Edward Wall's "The John White Family in the Boston Musical Scene, 1829-1935"

Ira Johnson White Timeline

Year Age Description 1813 Born

1825 12 Built first V iolin

1830 17 Moved to Boston with family

.1833 20 Producing professional violins bythis time

'1841 28 Awarded s1lver medal at MCMC competition

1843 30 Inspects and measures Stadivari violin for first time, that of Alexandre Artot

1844 31 Awarded silver medal at MCMC competition

'1845 32 Working at 59 Court Street with brother James Henry Whfte

1849 36 James Henry White leaves to start business with son, also named James Henry White

1850 37 Started partnership with brother Asa Warren at 52 Court Street, named I.J and A.W. White

1853 40 White brothers move business to 86 Tremont St. and change name to White Brothers

1863 50 Leaves partnership with Asa Warren White, moves to Cedar Street, Malden

1871 58 Moves 1o Upham Street, Melrose

1895 82 Passes away

Asa Warren White Timeline

Year Age Description

1826 Born 1830 4 Moved to Boston with family 1843 17 Started Working for N. Giraudot at the shop of

1850 24 Started partnership with brother Ira Johnson W_hite at

1853 27 Shop moved to 86 Tremont Street, changed name to White Bros.

1863 37 Ira Johnson White leaves WMe Bros. Partnership to move to Malden. Asa Warren White stays at 86 Tremont Street and changes shop name to Tremont Temple Music Store

???? Takes on Louis Goullaud, staying at 86 Tremont Street, changing name to White and Goul/aud

1868 42 Started importing high quality German instruments which he regraduated and varnished

1872 46 Starts numbering his instruments on the labels 1874 48 Awarded gold medal at MCMA competition 1875 49 Published the booklet The Violin: Some Advice in Selecting

Both the Violin and Bow 1876 50 leaves White and Goul/aud partnership.

Opens own shop at 50 Bromfield Street 1878 52 Awarded silver medal at MCMA competition 1879 53 Moves to Chicago after death of wife, Elizabeth Reed 1881 55 Moves bacl< to Boston, opens shop at 147 Tremont Stree.t 1888 62 Moves shop to 633 East Broadway , South Boston 1890 64 Probably closes down business in South Boston 1892 66 Revised and published booklet, The Violin:How to Construct

from Beginning to Completion 1894 68 Passes away

INSTRUMENT NUMBER AND DATE FOR ASA WARREN WHITE

~ ~ M2!l!!l Instrument none 1860's violin none 1868 violin none 1869 August violin none 1870 March violin none "1870 May violin none 1871 December CELLO

16 1872 March violin 17 1872 March 8 violin 41 1872 July violin 49 1872 October violin 52 1872 violin 53 1872 November violin 56 1872 December violin 72 1873 June violin 75 1873 July violin 78 1873 August violin

none 1873 September violin none 1873 VIOLA

? 1874 CELLO 118 1875 February violin 128 1875 June VIOLA 131 1875 July violin 155 1876 May violin 163 1876 August violin 184 1876 August violin 190 1877 violin 198 1876 April violin 207 1877 November violin 221 1878 February violin 229 1878 June violin 310 1880 violin 341 1885 violin

? 1886 violin 428 1891 violin

? 1893 violin 434 1895 violin

IRA JOHNSON WHITE

Instrument Measurements (all measurements in millimeters)

Maker I.J. White I.J . White I.J. White I.J . White Instrument violin violin violin violin

Instrument Date 1835 1860 1877 1880 Instrument Number none none none nor.~e

Overall length 610.0 600.0 Body length 360.0 358.0 360.5 355.0 Upper Bout 170.0 171 .0 172.0 168.0 Middle Bout 112.0 116.0 117.0 114.0 lower Bout 206.0 208.0 210.0 209.0 Bottom Block Rib Height 30.0 31.5 29.0 29.0 Corner Block Rib Height 30.0 30.5 29.0 28.0 Top Block Rib Height 29.0 30.0 29.0 27.5 String length 327.0 333.0 330.0 330.0 Arching Height- Belly 17.0 16.6 Arching Height- Back 16.0 13.5 Scroll:

Max. width of ears 38.0 41 .3 Min width (top of scroll) 11.9 12.0 Peg box wall width at bottom 3.5 4.3 Peg box wall width at top 6.1 6.0 Width at widest part of peg box

(next to nut) 22.0 3.6 Width of heel 25.0 27.0

Sound Holes: Width b/t upj)er eyes 41.0 44.5 Width b/t lower eyes 112.5 117.5 Width between notches 72.5 79.0 Total height 81.0 75.0 Diameter of upper eye 8.0 6.5 Diameter of lower eye 10.5 9.5

Button Width 18.9 9.1 Button Height 11.0 10.0 Neck length 132.0 131 .5 Overstand -bass 3.5 4.0 Overstand -treble 3.5 4.0 Edge thickness 3.8 4.0

ASA WAREN WHITE

Instrument Measurements (all measurements in millimeters)

Maker · A.W.Wiiite A.W.White_, A.W.White A.W.White Instrument . violin violin · · violin viola

lnstr~ment Date 1860's* 1872 1876 1875 Instrument Number none 16 -155 "128

Overall Length 596.0 605.0 680.0 Body Length 356.0 360.0 358.0 401 .0 Upper Bout 167.0 171 .0 169.0 195.0 Middle Bout 118.0 114.5 116.0 131.0 Lower Bout 207.0 210.0 208.0 238.0 Bottom Block Rib Height 31.0 31.0 31.7 37.7 Corner Block Rib Height 31.0 29.5 31 .5 37.5 Top Block Rib Height 30.0 29.0 30.6 35.0 String Length 328.0 326.0 326.0 372.0 Arching Height- Belly 16.0 16.8 16.5 Arching Height- Back 13.0 15.3 17.5 Scroll:

Max. width of ears 39.5 38.5 44.0 Min width _{top of scroll) 11.5 11.4 12.1 Peg box wall width at bottom 1.9 4.5 5.0 Peg box wall width at top 5.0 4.5 3.5 Width at widest part of peg box

(next to nut) 21 .7 24.4 24.6 Width of heel 26.4 27.4 29.1

Sound Holes: Width b/t upper eyes 45.0 41.5 48.5 Width b/t lower eyes 120.5 111.5 125.0 Width between notches 84.0 72.0 85.0 Total height 77.0 79.0 87.5 Diameter of upper eye 7.0 6.0 7.0 Diameter of lower eye 10.0 9.8 11.3

Button Width 18.4 18.5 22.0 Button Height 12.0 12.0 13.0 Neck Length 129.0 130.5 149.0 Overstand- bass 5.5 3.0 6.0 Overstand -treble 4.5 3.0 5.5 Edge thickness 4.0 4.3 4.0

* It is believed that this is an earlier A.W. White violin made in the 1860's

1

Schoenbaum lecture

I want to naturally thank Chris for the warm words, don't necessarily believe everything he says, the

least I can do is reply with a few warm words of my own. You've been welcomed this morning already

by your officers and you've just been warmly welcomed by the library; as I understand my mandate , my

job, here is to believe it or not, welcome you on beha lf of hist. Now as you know as any of you who've

ever found yourself seated next to history on an airplane, this means finding a place to start and at

points like that we all remember what our high school coaches and debate coaches advised us. The

usual way to go about this is with a joke or a question, and what I've proposed to do is combine them so

here it is.

My family, my son in fact is physically here to confirm that I can be believed on this my family can

confirm that I personal ly am about as qualified to be one of your number as I am to be a professiona l

bullfighter. And you can also take it from me personally, to put this delicately, that I don't perform solo

in public. So the question that comes up is, what am I doing here in front of some of America's most

distinguished violin and bow makers in a hal l that was intended for the likes of Milstein, Szigeti, and

the Budapest quartet. Now the good thing is I have an answer, in fact I have two answers, the first is a

story I came across some years ago in General Maxwell Taylor's {sp) memoirs. As a few of the older

members of the organization might remember Taylor many, many, years ago was a dashing young

airborne general in WWII and sometime in 1944 he therefore found himself reviewing a column of

paratroopers in Britain and since he had to break the ice, he then addressed a young soldier and he said

as his ice breaker, "Well, tell me, soldier" he said enthusiastically) ''Don't you enjoy jumping out of

airplanes?" and the soldier said "No" and there was an awkward pause. Then With the coolness under

f ire and the presence of mind that Clausewitz {sp) called genius, the so ldier continued, "But I certainly

enjoy being in the company of people who do". So t hat should give you a reasonable approximation of

how I feel about being here in your number to talk to you.

So that gets me to my second answer. When I was in what I estimate post facto was 4th grade in

Milwaukee, the public school music teacher came around one day looking for customers and for reasons

that I am absolutely at a loss to recall I volunteered. So for the next few years the Milwaukee public

schools offered me violin classes at an affordable price (just try imagining that today) and one thing led

to another. Now one thing it led to, that's likely to be of interest to you professional ly, was a violin five

years older than I locally made by an Austrian immigrant named Lawrence J. Fisher (sp) bow and case

included, my parents bought it for me for $150, a price at the time that set my father back on his heels

and ,though no one in those days talked about such things, I assume that that also included a cut for the

teacher. Now the second thing my fourth grade decision led to was a working relationship with two

distinguished, even iconic, violinists in my last year of high school and soon after in my first year at the

University of Wisconsin Madison. But at age sixteen of course I didn't have a clue fn fact of how

interesting this really was. So here, I hope, is a photo of the first, though let's be clear this isn't how he

looked when I met him. Although his name which is Flohizel Von Geuter (sp) sounds like the hero of one

of those post-Wagnerian operas that were composed by someone you have to look up in Grove1S, he

was in fact born in Davenport, Iowa, but his father died early, his mother took him back to Europe where

he made a prodigious career as a kid and made a respectable career as a grownup. So far as he knew, he

2

was the first violinist ever to make an evening of the Paganinl Caprices, twelve in the first half before the

intermission, twelve after the intermission and this persuaded him that he had a special relationship to

Paganini and so he took up spiritualism to complete the connection. He hung on as a conservatory

professor in Berlin until after WWII when an ex student from Milwaukee then rescued him and brought

him back to America. Now comes the other significant figure. The other significant figure in my early life

was a man named Rudolph Koelisch (sp) who was born in Vienna in 1896 who is memorable among

other things for having because of a childhood injury he spent his life playing left handed, which created

a certain occupational hazard for his opportunities as an orchestra player and so he ended up as the

most distinguished quartet player of his era. In the 20's and 30's the Koelisch (sp) quartet played

premieres of just about everything, a few ofthem in fact in this very auditorium. He was the dedicatee

of two of the Bartok quartets, he was also Arnold Schoenberg's brother in law, and he was smart

enough and lucky enough to get to the United States before WWII, and to find a job in Madison with the

Pro Arte quartet, another of the distinguished ensembles of the era, when the job came open after the

death of its first vio linist. Now put the two of them together, two distinguished Centra l Europeans in

their fifties one of them shoulder-deep in the 19th century past, one a self-made bellwether of what in

those days was believed to be the 20th century future, both of them relocated eighty miles from one

another between Lake Michigan and Lake Mendota, each casually oblivious to the presence of the other

and, most amazing in retrospect1 at least to me, that people who had shared seances with Arthur Conan

Doyle and played tennis with Charlie Chaplin were now, directly or indirectly, reduced to teaching me.

And yet it was not until I reached the foothills of what we tentatively call adulthood that it occurred to

me that th is was significant. Not only that, I realized that I was looking at a history that historians (the

capital H professional kind) to date hadn't looked at either and certainly not the profession as I

understand it. That is the card-carrying profession entrusted with the stuff since the modern university

was invented, which is around the time that Jefferson invented the University of Virginia and Congress

in fact was inventing the Library of Congress. Art historians hadn't touched it, music historians hadn't

touched it, cultural historians hadn't touched it, social historians hadn't touched it, economic historians

hadn't touched it, political historians hadn't touched it either, although believe me there are the

makings of a book and a couple of movies, in the political history of the 20th century violin alone. Now to

a point I think the blind spot even for all its many services includes our host.

In principle this Library has been around since 1800 when Congress appropriated $5000 to buy, and I

quote this, 'such books as may be necessary for its use'. But it was nearly a century before it moved into

this splendid heap around us, and that was its first permanent home. Now in all fairness, in the years

since 1897 it cannot be denied that the Library has made up for lost time. Since 1897 it has showcased

Guttenberg bibles, Shakespearean folios, the Book of Kells, a gold lettered copy of the Magna Carta,

Thomas Jefferson's personal draft of the Declaration of Independence, Herb Lockhart (sp) tunes, Bob

Hope's business cards, and fragments of the Dead Sea scrolls. Yet even by Library standard the two

week celebration we are about begin today is almost certainly a ground-breaker. So, why the blind spot,

considering we are dealing with an invent ion virtually unchanged now for almost 500 years, still used

daily in most of the world, an instrument that changed the course of music, an icon right before us with

name recognition to match Coca Cola.

3

Now I have two theories about this. The first is that handicrafts, even supremely great handicrafts

like Stradivari's, don't get no academic respect, with the possible exception, and that only occurred to

me quite recently, of East Asian artifacts. The other is that violinists may practice medicine like F.

William Sunderman the ???? pathologist of Philadelphia who died a few years ago at 100, they may

paint up a storm like Paul Klee and lngres, they may get appointed to the Supreme Court like Abe

Fortas, they may run successfully for president like Thomas Jefferson, they may even invent fascism,

and I'm not making this up, another distinguished violinist Benito Mussolini, but just as Carla Shapreau

could well be the first practicing lawyer professional violin maker known to history, the only historian

violinist I've ever met is me. So know you know why I'm here. I am not just the first professional

historian to take you seriously by asking a few new questions and looking in a few unaccustomed

directions, I am also here, more good news, to tell you that I think you are even more interesting than

you probably realize. Now of course you can infer some of this from the program your committee in fact

has put together, with its multi course menu on how a truly global instrument has touched us at

virtually every level from onward and upward to down and dirty for about 250 years, over the next

two days acknowledged stars of the craft and the trade will present an overview of the great American

schools, shops, and makers from sea to shining sea. Between them, the performers, the Turtle Island

quartet, the Julliard quartet (if you can get a ticket), Elmar Oliveira, Matt Glaser (sp), Jay Unger, Molly

Mason will present an overview of the great American repertory, from late Beethoven to jazz fiddle and

funk. Between sessions you can step into the Whittall pavilion next door and you can look at George

Gemunder's naturalization papers, Joe Venuti's birth certificate, not to mention the all-American bow

built for Albert Einstein the well-known Princeton amateur. But what the American violin is really about

is a cultural history of the United States, and that I think is as revealing and comprehensively American

as the evolution of the automobile or baseball. The traces of this are reflected alike in its makers,

dealers, and players all the way back to the beginnings, pre-national beginnings at that. By 1757 the

fourteen-year-old Thomas Jefferson was already a competent player who had happily fiddled duets with

the young Patrick Henry over the Christmas holidays. By the early nineteenth century the instrument

was a favorite motif of William Sydney Mount (the Jacksonian era,s Norman Rockwell), who even

presented a violin of his own, one of the real ornaments of Gary Sturm1s collection, with a trapezoidal

body and vertical f-holes, at the New York Exhibition of Industry of (get this) All Nations in 1853. By the

mid nineteenth century the instrument was as ubiquitous as Woody Allen's Zelig. An archive photograph

from 1846 shows a couple of sisters and friends neatly posed around their violins, and cello. A

Minnesota Ladies Symphony, with orchestrated smiles and kilometers of organdy, faces the camera a

half century later. At Fort Bowie, Arizona, the violins of the 4 th Calvary Orchestra line up behind their

music stands in 1886. In Deadwood, South Dakota, railroad workers show off their violins, improbably,

to a stray deer. Lumber camps cooks and fiddlers stand fraternally in the dining hall of a logging camp, I

don't know where, in 1902. Instruments in hand, an American Gothic family poses before the parlor

harmonium in 1905, seemingly impervious to Ben Shawm (sp) the Farm Security Administration

photographer (another contribution of the Library of Congress) this African American fiddler in the

depths of the Depression fiddles for nickels in 1935. Now the instruments are anonymous, some

domestic, a few very possibly home-made, but none of them the kind that makes collector's hearts sing.

In fact pioneer American collectors had already surfaced, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century

the exuberantly named Royal DeForest Hawley, a Hartford Connecticut dealer in quote" hardware,

4

feed, and general agricultural products" bought six Strads for himself and his friends to play for fun. But

most instruments as you know came by the boatload from European factories despite the McKinley

Tariffs with their ad valorum duties of 50%. Markneukirchen in Saxony, on what is now in walking

distance of the Czech border , Markneukirchen alone turned out enough fiddles to become the richest

little town in Germany with its own US Consulate. Tariff and all, Sears Roebuck then retailed them at

$6.95, and I quote the catalog, "best violin ever offered at this price", and that included bow, case, and

user's manual. According to Thomas Wenberg's Violin Makers of the United States, which many of you

might know from the inside, clearly a labor of love, there were some 3500 violin makers that he could

locate between the mid-nineteenth and late 20th century. But it probably won't come as a surprise to

you that most of them were careful to hang onto their daytime jobs and some of these jobs are doozies;

coal miner, cowboy, court reporter, chiropractor, union organizer, mail carrier, Ford dealer. Now and

then distinguished makers surface too, like the immigrant Gemunder whose career extended from

1847 to 1899 when he died. Beginning at fourteen in 1901, the Chicago born Carl G. Becker worked

practically for love on instruments that now sell at old Italian prices, at America's closest approximation

of an Andrea Amati, he also passed the torch to son and grandchildren, some of whom may be here with

us. Wonderful!

But the transition from blue smocks and spectacles to Birkenstocks and denim would have to await the

1970's when young Americans who started on dulcimers discovered violins and the down sized post war

dpllar began to make new American made viol ins competitive. A generation later, newcomers like SC!m

Zygmuntovicz of Philadelphia and Brookyn had begun American classics. On ly last year, Joseph Curtin of

Ann Arbor, a trailblazer in the use of composite materials was certified a genius by the MacArthur

Foundation, making him I think the first certified genius in the whole history of the profession.

Now dealing reflected that real world too. By the 1880's Chicago's Lyon and Healy was music's answer

to Carson Pirie Scott, Markneukirchen exported people as well as violins, among them Moennigs who

opened a shop in Philadelphia in 1905, and Rudolph Wurlitzer, whose son Rudolph Henry had brought a

respectable collection of old instruments to Cincinnati by 1918. As collector quality fiddles, like all

European assets, rolled westward after WWI, the evidence at our feet American dealing finally began in

earnest. With postwar inflation out of control Emil Hermann of Berlin discovered America in the early

1920s. He soon opened a flagship shop in New York whose comparative advantages included the

workbench genius of Simone S. Sacconi an immigrant f rom Rome. In 1937 New York acquired an even

more important shop when Rudolph Henry Wurlitzer's native son Rembert arrived from Cincinnati. In

the wake of WWII Jacques Francais arriving from Mirecourt, the French Markneukirchen, established a

new New World beach head that Rene Morel, another workshop genius soon turned into the violin

world's answer to Harvard Graduate School for the new generation of American makers.

Meanwhi le, the young American dealers were making their debut1 too, about 1000 miles from

Manhattan. "I am an American, Chicago born, and go at things as I have taught myselt free-style, and

will make the record in my own way" said Saul Be llows' Augie March in 1953 in the opening lines of the

great American novel. Twenty years later with the post-war dollar gone the way of Howdy Doody, Augie

reappeared in the violin business, but he was split down the middle between the tall, dapper Robert

Be in and the Buddha-dimensional Jeff Fushi, both of them college dropouts, so-so players and active

5

Scientologists, in all respects the first of t heir kind in the history of the trade, and very American. They

first discovered one another, earlier than most they then discovered that Japanese and South Koreans

were eager to buy old Ita lian Fiddles that English owners and consignees were keen to sell. Returning to

Chicago with the proceeds they then set up shop down the street from Orchestra Hall in a building once

occupied by the author of t he Wizard of Oz. Thirty years later with the boom in China on-line, China's

president Zhong Zhe Min {sp) (the previous president) stopped by the shop in effect reciprocating

Fushi's visit to Beijing. Meanwhile, like the arrival on US shores of Vettlesman (sp) and Honda, the arrival

of Dietmar Machold in Bremen, Zurich, Vienna, and Tokyo was a salutary rem inder that the violin

market has always been global and that the U.S. remained a good place to do business. He began in New

York )ike Hermann and Francais, he then moved on to Seattle and most recently to Ch icago just down

the street from Orchestra Hal l in the building once occupied by the author of the Wizard of Oz.

Players al l this time could be found anywhere. What Jefferson declared a "delightful recreation" in 18th

century Virginia was still cultivated in the 201h Century by mainline Ph iladelphians like Catherine Drinker

Bowen (sp}, an equally serious amateur who wrote well and often about the Founding Fathers. Her

father in fact let her study at Baltimore's Peabody Conservatory. His on ly cond ition was that she not

turn professional like the " lzzies" as an aunt called her Jewish classmates who had to play for a living.

Well into t he 201h century the great American middle class saw the violin as at least a respectable

accessory. Frederick Douglass of Anacostia, the great black leader and the first emancipated black man

(sic) and a nephew, who has a few problems I th ink with his right hand technique.

In the early 1930's Medicine Lodge, Kansas, population 5,000, according to a credible source, a native,

the late Dorothy Delay, supported five violin teachers. An undated family photo shows the young, oop,

this is the middle class aspiring to onward and upward. I'd meant to show this to you as the Great

American Generic, this is a Great American Specific.

In 2003 the Reverend Louis Farra khan {sp) xxxxx Nee Wallcotxxxxx? once a talented school boy violinist

in Boston, performed the Beethoven Violin Concerto at a Nation of Islam Convention in Los Angeles "to

destroy the myth of white supremacy" as he explained.

At the lower end of the social ladder slave fiddling is documented back to the 1690's, slave fiddlers were

a fixture at plantation bal ls, you see it in Mount's painting I showed you earlier. String bands were a

familiar institution, and a directory of early 20th Storyville musicians, believe it or not, reports more

violinists than trumpeters. Into the early 1930's OK, a label specializing in black artists, made a good

thing of fiddle blues.

On the other hand, the first internationally distinguished American concert players were impeccably

WASP and impeccably Yankee. Illinois born and Chicago trained Maud Powell, after Caruso the most

recorded artist of her era, seen here voting (another breakthrough} played the US premieres of the

Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, and Sibelius concertos} toured Europe with the Sousa band, and left her papers to

the New York Public Library. Her father was superintendent of schools of the District of Columbia, her

uncle was John Wesley Powell,the pioneer explorer of the Grand Canyon, later director of the US

Geological Survey. Il linois born and Italian trained Albert Spalding played the US premieres of the

6

Dohnanyi , Elgar, and Barber concertos, accompanied by the New York Symphony Orchestra on the f irst

European tour by any American orchestra (in the 20's), and he served in both world wars, in the Second

World War, in fact, with the OSS. His father cofounded the great American sporting goods company (see

any Major League baseball). His uncle, Albert G. Spalding, a pitcher for the Boston Red Stockings and

president of the Chicago White Stockings (antecedent, take my word for it, of the Chicago Cubs), was

among the first class to be elected to the newly opened Basebal l Hall of Fame in 1939.

The new era began at Carnegie Hall the afternoon of October 27th' 1917, when the young Jascha Heifetz,

just 17, recently arrived via Siberia and San Francisco, made his New York debut. "No one seemed more

transported than Maud Powell, who stayed to applaud frantically until the very last encore", said a

contemporary viewer.

The new era, whose shadow would extend into the next century, namely this one, would be the age of

Bowen's " lzzies", largely Jewish immigrant kids who took to the instrument like Joe Dimaggio took to

baseball. Like Dimaggio, three of them even came from San Francisco: Yehudi Menuhin, age 8; Ruggiero

Ricci, an honorary "lzzy", who supported a whole Italian immigrant family while he was still in knickers,

and amazingly rema ins active to this day, in his 80's; and Isaac Stern, the White Knight who saved

Carnegie Hall from the wrecker's ball and cultural ice breaker that he was, f irst showed the stars and

stripes in post Stalin Russia and later in post Maoist China.

The age of the " lzzies" leads straight to the age of globalization. ln 1967 Kyung Wha Chung of South

Korea shared the Leventred (the violin world's Olympic Gold) with Pinchas Zukerman of Israel. Both

studied in New York w ith Ivan Galamian, formerly of Moscow and Paris. A quick survey (mine, recently)

of thirty-two Philharmonic violinists on the roster identifies ten Jews and ten Asians in a contigent of

thirty-two, and of the ten Asian, nine of them are women. Seen metaphorically, there they are.

The pedagogical torch meanwhile passed to Dorothy Delay, Dorothy from Kansas, whose proteges not

on ly include ltzak Perlman and Sarah Chang, but Kurt Zeissmenshaus {sp) the German immigrant

maestro from Cincinnati. Entrepreneurial as any Wurlitzer, Zessmenshaus, as many of you probably

know now, another breakthrough, now teaches on line while operating a summer camp for the next

cohort of prodigies in Beijing. Each in her way, Regina Carter the jazz maestroreine (sp) from Detroit

who was invited in 2001 to play the legendary Paganini's no less legendary Del Gesu in his home town

Genoa, and Kismet AI Khousseini (sp) an Iraqi Suzuki teacher in the D. C. suburbs, are eye-openers too.

They may not exactly represent the American violinist as envisaged by Jefferson or even Joe Venuti

understood it, they nonetheless seem to me as American as apple pie and that ain't chopped liver

either.

So how about a few fearless guesses about the future?

First, good news, qualified good news, I think there w ill continue to be people who want to hear Mozart

and Beethoven. We also know that the violin is an amazingly f lexible instrument and that it can sti ll do

th ings electric guitars and synthesizers can't, so I think the odds are good that there will still be people

who want to play it.

Second, we need go no further than this room for proof that the American violin is not only a good

product and a good buy but the best it's ever been. "Honor your American Masters'' to paraphrase the

finale of Wagner's Meistersinger. Cellists know this, violists know this, it's t ime that violinists got the

message too.

7

Third, the vertical takeoff of old Master prices in the last thirty years has enhanced the American violin's

comparative advantage vis a vis any number of Amatis and Gaglianos but it hasn't necessarily enhanced

it vis a vis contemporary violins in other places. The violin trade has always been global, all of us watch

the same Web sites, all of us know that skills are fungible .

Fourth point, final one, like Woodward and Bernstein in the movie version, the great violins fol low the

money. We the people of the United States currently run budget and current account deficits like

nobody, anywhere, ever. Thanks primarily to Japan, South Korea, and above all China, which recycle

their dollars in T-bills, we also manage to live with this quite comfortably, so comfortably that we in fact

can even cut taxes, but that's no guarantee that this w ill go on forever. It's at least imaginable that one

day the bubble will pop, the dollar will fall, U.S. interest rates will take off. If and when that happens, it's

bound to have interesting consequences for quite a lot of things, including both violins in America and

the American violin, but that's a big subject and I suggest we save it for the next conference.

(applause}

First, can I assume that some discussion is permitted, welcomed?

(Inaudible)

I feel a little like Lucy in the old Peanuts strip, 5 cents the Historian is ln. yeah, please.

(Inaudible) .... number of Strads .....

Well, Lyon and Healy said so. (Inaudible) And they turn up in what's his names 1945 book, "How many

Strads?", Doring.

(inaudible)

Its' unique. What am I doing? The reason I've spent the last ten years at least working on the book is

because no one else was doing it and for a lot of reasons I think it's very probable that no one wil l ever

write it again. It's a weird conjunction of Market, personal interest, language skills, and there are days,

though mercifully not a lot of them, when I wonder if I'm not in fact writing a monumental obituary. But

your presence in the room is reassuring to both of us. (laughter)

( ... comment on ..... global.. .... inaudible)

Well Chris is better qualified to comment on th is though not necessarily more objective. XXXXX (sp}

pointed out to me, and though obvious, it hadn1t occurred to me, thirty, fifty years ago t here were a lot

more people dealing in these things, and the escalation of prices is such that we' re now down to the last

tiny handfu l of dealers and it is at least imaginable that these things in fact will vanish creatively into

8

institutional collections though Carla's discovered that even the institutions have problems. UCLA has

apparently put a Strad up for sale. Now, what is interesting is that this makes authenticity a comparative

advantage so the dealers compete in authenticity. Going back to the previous question, it is a thing of

fascination to me that the only serious violinist historians have been dealers, or dealers hired

researchers. And obviously, because they're peddling authenticity of a maker as a comparative

advantage, and so therefore the quality of expertise at least within the circumscribed area of Old Italian

and a few French violins gets higher and higher and better and better. And I would think it is very hard

to know where dealing is going, because the only way out of the magic drcle is to discover undiscovered

great 19th century makers, say, because the old Italians will be in glass cases, and at that point I would

think the advantage in fact is yours, what can I say because any sensible person would buy a great new

violin from the people whose authenticity w ill be a matter of interest to other dealers in the next two

hundred years.

(inaudible}

Boy, well, I'm a historian, I only predict things after they happen (laughter} but I think Asia pretty well

fills the space as far as any of us can see. The interesting thing is that, a little like basebal l, we always talk

about a global market but I think this is the first time it has literally been global, and this goes back to

the early 70's European recovery, the creation of the East Asian tigers, the coming of age of post-Maoist

China, huge populations, and I suppose, now we're ta lking dealing again, not only follow the money,

follow Dietman Machold. When Dietman Machold makes it to India you will know something significant

has happened. And when he makes it to the Middle East, we'll all know that something significant has

happened.

(inaudible} close to Dario .... research with .... secrets .... homegrown industry ... indlviduals .... (inaudible}

It's an interesting observation, I guess it recalls that genre of exam questions that say ''compare and

contrast", and the follow up questions is "did Stradivari make pencils?" but also unlike violins pencils are

self liquidating, while violins we like to think go on forever.

(inaudible)

Oh goodness, I never met one.

8888

1

NEW ENGLAND

Darcy Kuronen

Sort of what triggered all this for me was, I wrote an article about Benjamin Crehore back in 1991, who's

sort of the best-known of the very early really good makers and I've learned, in my field, you write one

article on something and suddenly you're a damn expert and it just snowballs. I then got invited to

participate in an exhibition and a series of essays at Brigham Young University about early American

instruments and got tapped to write about early American strings and so this other article, which

ultimately was not published by Brigham Young, but did appear in the American Musical Instrument

Society Journal back in 2002. So, if you would rather go have a coffee break or take a nap, you can just

go get that article and pretty much catch everything I'm going to say now, and you can get a copy of that

article, it's 10 dollars for that back issue of the Journal. It's 2002. Just go to the AM IS web site, amis.org

and you should be able to order that. I'm sure that this organization and the VSA feed a lot of your

interests but if there are any sort of, you know, closet bagpipe or accord ion fans out there, you might

look into the American Musical Inst rument Society as well, and as the vice president of it currently, I

need to promote membership in that. So take a look at their website sometime and see if there might

be some things that feature into those interests there as well. When I did my article, I certainly had a lot

of help from the violin community, including people that are here today and they're all thanked in the

foot notes of the article. And I sort of want to thank them for giving, because I'm not a violin maker, I'm

not an instrument maker, and they brought a different set of eyes to what I was looking at when I was

doing this research. So they can both take credit, and also blame, for some of the observations that I

mlght point out today.

And speaking of websites, you can also go to my museum's website, which is mfa.org (i.e. Museum of

Fine Arts) and we do have an online database of hundreds of thousands of things in the museum, but it

does include all one thousand of our musical instruments. So you can go pull up images of any of the

bowed string instruments or the accordions or the bagpipes or whatever you're interested in and see

those. It is, for the most part, just a front shot of the violins, but the information is there, so if you can't

remernber, "what is the date of that Ira White violin?" it's all there at your fingertips) like so much is on

the internet nowadays. We're sort of, you know, going way back, as Chris says here, if you look at

lutherie in Arnerican at this time, notwithstanding the work of John Anties (sp) in the Moravian

community, and we have that wonderful piece up in the exhibition, and the work of Peter Young down

in Philadelphia, but in terms of sheer production the most lutherie is taking place up in New England up

through, let's say the 1820's, 1830's, although it's very seldorn it takes the form of actual violins. And as I

said at the outset, this may not be very interesting material to you, because the violins themselves, the

instruments, are not really that inspiring towards the Italian aesthetic. I would say that a lot of this stuff

has survived in pretty unmolested condition and if we had, you know, even a fraction of this materia l

sort of on the European side, the stuff that came before Arnati and before things got refined, we would

understand a lot more but the sad thing w ith all historica l instruments is that there's a huge rate of

attrition. You know, the number of things that get made and that just do hot survive even a few

generations, because of their fragility or because they fall out of popularity is fairly frustrating when

you're trying to put together a picture so always keep that in mind when you're looking at any of this old

stuff, that we're only looking at a fraction of it. So l'h1 going to go through, again fairly quickly, h1ore or

less chronological order, with some sort of forward and back, here, and we'll see how the slides came

out.

2

Phil Kass took my best story about the criminal Jeffery Stafford (sp), you know, because he worked both

in New England and New York, but you heard that story about him being a criminal, and that he never

really got over that. The one thing I would point out, Phil, as he mentioned, took that from this book on

New York, " lnstruh1ent Makers" by Nancy Gross. The earliest version of this story is actually from 1890,

it's a history of American piano making, but that author didn't credit, where did that story really come

from. It would be great to verify, was there really a, was this just an apocryphal story, so soh1eday we

should do some research, was there really a criminal named Jeffery Stafford and did he coh1e over and

you know, it would be terrific, of course, if an instrument would surface but that seems unl ikely at this

point. But you never know, you're the people whose shops it might come into.

The f irst New England maker that we have f irm documentation about, other than Stafford (which we

haven't proved) is a fellow, a very elusive character, named James Juhan or sometih1es spell Joan or

Juan, was active in Boston from about 1768 to 1771, he was giving lessons in music and French and he's

organizing concerts and musical theater, you know, in other words, he's trying to make a living. But he

also built instruments, and as you can see at the end of this ad in a newspaper from 1770, he was having

a concert when he says that "all the viol ins that shall be used in this concert have been manufactured

here by the said Joan", as he spelled his name sometimes, who makes and sells, very cheap, Violins,

screw bows, cases, bass viols, etcetera in no ways inferior to the best imported .11 Aga in, we have no

surviving instruments by him, it would be terrific if something would crop up, especially since he worked

also in Philadelphfa, Charleston, places in Virginia. Like I say, he's a very elusive character, but we do

have concrete evidence of him. I don't think he's making this up when he says that he's making

instruments, but he may not have made very many so it might be hard to turn one up.

I wasn't quite sure where to put this next piece chronologically, so just sort of to get it out of the way,

there are numerous rustic violins, you know, that may hail from New England and elsewhere, there's no

makers name, no year of fabrication, we don't know when they date from, because they just, they're

out oftime. Some Caribbean's as early as the 18thcentury, it's very hard to tel l. The only thing we can say

is that they have a tendency to exaggerate all the features, the body outline, sound hole shapes, the

scroll carving, the varnish, all of this is very eccentric. There's a wide variety of skill and, you know,

aesthetic sense being shown here, and it's all mostly by rural artisans with no violin to emulate, just

maybe the memory of what one looks like. As folk art, they're quite appealing, and if nothing else, they

show this very strong desire in the colonies and in early America, to have a visible (physica l?)

instrument, even If you have to whittle it out with a jack knife yourself. It (the slide)looks like it reads

pretty good from here, and l'h1 sorry that some of my ih1ages are in black and white, I never anticipated

that I would be giving slide talks down the road, this was for the article.

This is the earliest surviving, dateable violin made in New England; it's made in Lexington,

Massachusetts, 1779, by a fellow named Simeon Snow. We don't know much about Simeon Snow,

surely violin making was an amateur endeavor for him, he was probably a farmer. This h1ay have been

3

his only instrument for all we know. It's very roughly made and It's been repaired countless times, but it

does have a lot of its original features stilL The outline is not very refined, very long corners, and the

arching is quite flat. The belly is nice fine-grained wood but we took a sample of it and it has been

analyzed microscopically as Eastern White Pine, and you' ll find that cropping up as a wood in many of

these other instruments to follow. The two-piece back and the ribs are made of beech, which, again, I

bet he got locally because he had no access to a nice piece of maple. You probably won't be able to tell

but the sound hole nicks are extremely offset from each other and they're angled in the wrong direction

from what is normal, which is something else we see a lot of people doing1 I'm not sure why they got

that part backwards. There's no purfling, but one ofthe features that it does retain and we' ll see this,

again in many early New England instruments, is that the plates1 the front and the back, have a groove

that the ribs are set right into, and there are consequently no linings or corner blocks. It's interesting to

see that they're doing this even at this early point and it's been very hard to trace why were they doing

that versus, you know, the more normal construction, what were they taking as the model. It also has

another feature that we'll see, which is usually referred to as a "footed" neck, which means that there is

no upper block into which you have mortised the neck, the neck just continues on into the body and in a

large instrument like a cello, it would take the shape of a foot, which is adapted from guitar

construction, where there's an "L" shape to give it something to grab onto on the back, and the back

usually has a little platform carved for it to attach to more firmly. In a violin, they actually don't really do

the "toe" part, they just sort of cut it off, but that neck does extend right into the body and the ribs

come around and are just glued right into the neck itself. And this likewise has that feature. I don't have

a side view of it but it does have a f ingerboard that's sort of in what we call the baroque style, it's raised

with a long wedge rather than with the angle of the neck.

Then we move on to the beginning of all th is, Mr. Benjamin Crehore. There isn't much violin making at

all going on in the colonies before the Revolution, after we got through the war manufacture of all sorts

of goods starts to increase quite a bit. And Benjamin Crehore in Milton, Massachusetts, just outside of

Boston, he is the first American luthier that we have a considerable body of work that we can compare.

He's active between about 1785 and 1815. He's from a family of woodworkers and he personally had a

reputation of being a very inventive 'mechanic', as they called themselves at the time, and that's a

theme that I think we will carry on with some of the later New England makers, too, is this sort of, "hey,

I can do that, I can make a violin" and oftentimes they came from other trades, like clock making or even

shoemaking or something like that. Now, Crehore reportedly made violins and also citterns, guitar type

things, and drumsm but the only ones we know to survive are cellos and pianos. At this point we have a

shift to really only just bass [nstrument, there really weren't any violins being made that we know of

until about 1830 or so. There was no need for violins, there was only one small theater orchestra in

Boston, and I know that it was similar in New York and Philadelphia as well. And, as I think someone else

pointed out earlier, that bass instruments were kind of hard to import, and the same thing happened in

England, which is why England developed an ability to make pretty good cellos. You could still import a

violin but sending across on a ship something as fragi le as a cello was hard, so they developed this

indigenous abil ity to make a good cello type instrument. Likewise, especially in New England, the violin

had this long association w ith dancing and therefore the devil and they're very Puritanica l up in Boston,

some would say they st ill are. The somber tone of the cello was considered to be ok to bring into the

4

church and to use for worship and that is what these bass instruments, these so-called bass viols (cellos)

were used for, was to keep the choir on pitch. They always used this term, bass viols, and it should not

be confused, of course, with the bass viola da gamba or the double bass. That term (bass viol) was also

used for those quite frequently.

Now, Crehore's only dated instrument {the others are undated) is this one from 1788. It is quite

eccentric in shape, as is obvious, and it is exceptionally large, the body is 33 1/4 inches long, and it's over

21 inches wide at the lower bout. It's a monstrous sized thing. It's very strangely displayed in our gallery,

people Wohder what the heck that thing is. But I did turn up another one that belongs to the Canton,

Massachusetts, historical society, likewise, large and eccentric. So there are things hiding out there st ill,

probably in historical societies and people's basements. The belly of this is Eastern White Pine, again,

and I sampled about ten of these bass viols in our collection, and seven out of ten of them have Eastern

White Pine for t he belly. I want to thank my colleague at the National Music Museum, John Koster, for

actually doing those microscopic samples for me. For the backs, we often have American grown hard

maple, but it's often slab cut, so there's not much figure to it. You will see on this that it has rather

elongated f-holes, and this is likewise a feature that seems to be used throughout many of the early

New England bass viol makers, at least. This instrument has had its neck replaced, but it does retain its

rather massive scroll. The plates on this do not have the groove construction that I mentioned on the

Snow violin, instead it has lfttle, short, triangular blocks; instead of a continuous lining, just little pieces;

and again that's something else that would have been seen in guitar type construction. You'll see that

mixed in from time to time on these early pieces.

There are some other Crehore bass viols that could be anywhere from 1790 to 1810. There' s about

three of them that actually approach the size of a European cello, in fact, a bit smaller, their body length

is about 28 7/8 (inches). The outline, though, still looks to be Crehore's own design. We can' t tell what

he would have done, looking at it for sure, but there doesn't seem to be anything classically European. It

has these very long middle bouts and it's very flattened and the upper and lower ends. The arching is

very flat, although it shows skill, he knew how to make a thing like this. The t-holes are quite large on

some of these, and he never did inlay purfling. He always just did ink purfling, which, you know, is

associated with cheaper instruments. It's almost always interrupted at the top there by the neck,

because it wou ld have been done with some sort of tool that you couldn't just continue that line

around, so they just stop it. He just fills it in with these X's and dots, you know, as a way of doing that

and others adapted that as well. A feature, if you were ever to see one of these and it was unlabeled,

they always, many of them, leave the back of the peg box flat, and Crehore used a (inaudible)sized

pattern there at the bottom of the back. I think the pegs on this, the tuning pegs may be origina l to this.

They're very similar to a Crehore bass vio l that's at the Smithsonian. I think just circumstantially that

would suggest they both have been with the instrument for a long time. As I mentioned, there's no

evidence of grooved plates on these Crehore instruments, but here is a photograph of what that footed

neck looks like. On Crehore, he tends to make a little point of it, and there's always a raised platform

carved from the inside of the back for that th ing to have a good gluing surface, and even, you'll see that

reinforced with a screw in some cases. (This (the slide) is) a little hard to read whether it has a screw or

not, (at least) without a mirror and that sort oftools.

5

There certainly are many other makers, and I'm not going to go into them, you know, that were making

these bass viols. I think Phil Kass referred to George Car, George Carlin, right, George Kaplan, who

worked in Philadelphia, but he started out in Hartford, and he did advertise violins. We don't have any

violins of his, there's one surviving cel lo that, that I think it belongs to someone out in Michigan or Ohio

now, I have a photograph of it and it's in the same naTve school. Most certain ly the patriarch of the bass

viol makers is Abraham Prescott, and I wouldn't be surprised if you've all heard his name or seen one of

these early Prescott bass viols or always called "church basses" in modern vernacu lar because that's

what they are used for, and this reflects that southern New Hampshire really became the center of bass

viol making from about 1800 to about 1840. There were hundreds of bass viols, and some double

basses, made up through about the 1840's but very sparingly violins, and we'll see one in just a moment.

Prescott made his first bass viol in Deerfield, New Hampshire, about 1809, and his first double bass as

early as 1820. He took on the Dearborn brothers when he was in Deerfield and as the business

expanded he quickly, very soon moved to Concord, New Hampshire, in 1831, and had as many as six

men working in his shop at certain times, although they would often just specialize in just certain parts,

just the plates or just the tuning machines that he used. I've seen estimates of anywhere from 800 to

2400 instruments coming out of his shop. I don't know how they can verify that, there are certainly a

number of them around and with the attrition we'll never know for sure. So, I'm going to try to quickly

go through just three examples of his work to show how his differed a little bit within a span of those

couple of decades.

Th is is one from 1819. It's a very well preserved example and that's the fortunate t hing for me when I'm

looking at th is stuff, it's generally not been changed, because these things are too big to be made into a

cello because of this longer body length that they have. This one weighs in at about 33 X inches long in

the length of the body and 19% at the lower bout, and that would be compared with something closer

to, you know, 29% to 30 inches in a European classic cello, and 18 inches wide at the bottom. It's, as I

say, a good deal bigger than those Crehores, than the small Crehores we looked at earlier. This, too, has

these very elongated f-holes, although he didn't stay with that, he did change the shape later on, and he

often in the early instruments used just a painted purfling. He used a (lope???) pattern instead of just

the double lines. Here is again, the % and back view of one of his scrolls, again he left the back flat. This

is before he started using gear tuning machines, which is much known for his instruments.

We don't own this instrument at the MFA, most of what I'm showing you 1s owned by the MFA, I've

been trying to talk the owner out of this for years, I'm sure he'll giVe ih eventually. This likewise has the

grooved plate construction. I was ta lking earlier with some of you about why would they, what was the

point of doing the grooved plates and the ribs set in, what was the purpose of that. Some say it's an

easier sort of construction, and we certainly do find it in earlier European instruments. I think it was

Andrew Dipper that proposed the idea to me that that's a very strong joint and it's going to hold up

better for rough use over time. if an instrument is going through wide cycles of humid and dry, which it

certainly would in America, so that might have been why, but in any event they stuck with that

construction quite a bit. This likewise has the short neck, short fingerboard, because they wete not

playing in high positions any way. Very distinctive looking scroll.

6

This is a little bit later instrument, this is more typical of his work, this is still in Deerfield. He made a

better wood choice now, both, especially on the back. The belly on this was analyzed as some sort of a

hard pine, maybe Pinus rigida, is that right? As I say, these were actually done with microscopic samples,

we're not guessing at these. Likewise you see the very elongated, almost cartoonlike f-hole. On the

scroll the peg box(???? wa lls?) are markedly different than the previous one, it has to be a little bit

meatier to accommodate the tuning machines which he introduced about 1821, and were very handy

for the amateur players who were doing this because they wouldn't slip on them. And this instrument

too is virtually all original condition; it would be lovely to have again very early Europeans which have

been lost to time and never been changed, we would know a lot more about our history that way.

This one is after he moved to Concord. There's a little bit of design from the previous two examples, in

particular it has a very dark, reddish varnish that's muddy in the appearance. And the f-ho le shape is

quite a bit different, I don't know if you noticed on the previous two, again, he's got these sound hole

nicks going the wrong direction but somewhere along the way he got them angled to what we consider

the correct way. And his bridges from two of those bass viols and you can go "what, gee, what a goofy

bridge". Again it would be wonderful to have original bridges from early Europeans, then we could learn

what were they actually using, so even if this only tells us that they didn't know what they were doing

it's better than having a replacement bridge, that you would just have to guess at what the original one

might have been.

Then, here is a pretty sad condition Prescott bass viol, but at least lets you see inside and see the(????

set-in?) neck that he used there.

A double bass from 1823 and, as I assume most of you know, the double basses are very sought after.

You can hardly give away the church basses because they're useless to most musicians, but the double

basses bring a rather good price at auction. This one is sti ll in original three-string set up1 there's been

no changes, and the finish is very sort of thin and dull, almost like a sort of a barn paint or something like

that. We have those very elongated f-holes again, and I suspect these things were used in churches just

like the bass viols. They were used to underscore the bass line. We know this one was used in the

meeting house in Amesbury (sp), Massachusetts. He (Crehore?) would have sold his instruments not just

out of his own shop but also in Boston shops like Henry Prentiss's (sp) shop, who sold a wide variety of

things, you can even see a bass viol hanging out front there as a sign or something like that.

And then I'll just go quickly through, here's three pairs of, sets of, or six altogether, f-holes from these

bass viols. You can just see the tremendous variety of shape in these things. Here's some that also have

another characteristic, which is that they attach them at the top and bottom sometimes. I think they

thought they were strengthening this part of th~ belly, and it's not unusual to find someone having cut

those away because they think it's a bad idea, but here's a couple of anonymous, very eccentric,

examples, but I don't know, I guess working in a visual atmosphere like the MFA I find that variety quite

exciting, even if it's in the realm of folk art.

No need to linger too long here, this is a couple of examples of something that are very rare, it's called a

tenor violin. I think that they were likewise used in churches, probably to play the tenor line. They are

7

quite big, they're much longer and thicker than a regular viola. We think that Prescott made some, his

ledgers mention "tenor viols''. They would almost have to be held in an upright position, like that and

just played, you know ... If you learned to play the bass viol you just would learn to play this thing in a

similar fashion. I don't have a nice% shot of the scrol l on that one but you can see how unusual the

design is there. Hard to say who made it, there're only about four or f ive of these things around. The

term "tenor" also gets used for violas in the 19th century too, so if you just come across it in print "tenor

viol" might mean actually viola.

But it'll be fun to get on to some actual violins, and this instrument was a great surprise to me, and

fortunately it's up in the exhibition for you to see, because I only have one or two black and white slides.

So this now moves us into, after the 1830's we finally start to see a few violins being made and bass viols

start to fade away by 1840's, because the mention of reed organs which you could play chorda lly on

them and those took on the role of supporting the choir in church. Interestingly, Prescott made a big

business of making reed organs as well, and so left the bass viol business behind.

Now we're on to violins, and they' re going to be a little less silly than the bass viols to you, but they are

still going to be silly. Until recently, no one thought that Prescott had ever made a violin, and I should

thank David Bromberg for pointing me as to where this one was owned, which was a gentleman in the

Boston area, and I went over to look at it and I was just stunned. I actually don't have that much of an

eye for identifying violins but it was pretty clear to me that no one was making this up, that it was by

Prescott and it is in fact signed inside and dated 1827. And his ledgers do show, his ledgers survive and

he does say that he sold some violins about that time. It's made really just virtua lly like the bass viols, it's

got the grooved plate, the (put in???) neck. The belly is spruce but it's made from four pieces of wood,

and the reason might be that the only spruce you could get would be used like in a door frame, or

something like that, it would be nice and straight grained, but it's only going to be about that wide, so

you're going to need four pieces to make a belly rather than two pieces that you got from Europe. Sorry

that I don't have the back, and you can't see the back upstairs either but it's a two-piece back and it

does have a pretty prominent flame pattern in it, so it might not be European but at least it 's got some

nice figure to it.

This has a very wide bass bar in it, it's almost a centimeter wide, and as you can see, the sound holes are

very wide, especially in proportion to the body and elongated, and he still has his nicks going backwards.

The purfling is actual purfling, but it's just one single line, it's not double purfling, so it's sort of an

unusual thing there. The back of the peg box, again finished flat. This points out this feature you can see

at the top of the scroll there that, as he begins the carving for the scroll, it just starts very abruptly,

"aant, here we're gonna go!" A colleague in Europe pointed out to me that you do see this sometimes in

early European violins. Their conception was that the peg box is one piece, the scroll is something else.

Now(adays) we think of this flowing smoothly together, but on this the peg box ends, scroll starts and so

that's another feature that if you find an anonymous that had that feature it might point to an early

New England provenance. This instrument is certainly provincial when you compare with classic

instruments, I'm deeply in love with this instrument and I very much want it to come to the MFA

someday, and I'm mainly the one person on the planet who wants it anyway. So, I think if I hold out long

enough, it will come. I think rts overa ll design is really quite marvelous, and it's very original in its

interpretation.

8

This is an instrument, also made in New Hampshire, by Will iam Darracutt and owned by the same guy,

he came up with this thing two years later, 1828. Darracutt was one of these, he did everything. He was

a dentist, he lettered signs, repaired clocks, made piano actions, but he kept a ledger of what he did,

too, which includes several string instruments. There are some double basses by Darracutt. (there is} an

entry for an "octave bass viol" which cou ld tnean anything, octave above, octave below. By the price it

must have been a double bass, an octave below. There are two Darracutts out there, this one and one

from 1837, a little bit different in outline but I think they're both authentic. He's using modern

construction, which is to say that he does have linings, corner blocks, inlaid purfling. The neck joints are

modern too, but one of them was replaced, I don't know. This one was replaced, it might originally have

been the footed style. The scrolls and sound holes are more sophisticated than Prescott and the wear on

t hem shows that they must have been played a great deal. I mentioned he didn't make a lot of

instruments in his lifetime but they're better than average for this very early date.

Here's a guy that did grow up in that bass viol tradition, Nehemiah White, no relation to the later Ira and

Asa that we're gonna look at; he worked out of Will iamsburg, Massachusetts, which is out in the

Connecticut River valley. (He's} known for bass vio ls but he did advertise double basses and violins and

violas. This is number 204, and maybe this is inflation, maybe he started with number 100, or maybe he

started with number 200 to inflate, but if this is t rue he made a lot of instruments. Not many left now,

because they're not that highly valued. This does have inked purfling, it has both crosses and dots on the

back like the early Crehores, the steep cut on the scroll. Normal linings, but a footed neck, so we're

starting to see a mix of things going on.

These (slides) aren't going to read real well, especially that one on the right, but this is a very fascinating

character. Ron Midgett probably knows a bit more about this guy, Samuel Brooks, out in Ashburnham

(sp) out in the middle of the state. He was a farmer and he made mostly violins and violas but he did

advertise some basses. We know at least eight instruments by him, including this violin and this viola.

The viola belonged to John M. Gould, who was the grandson of John A. Gould, and I need to track down

where that thing is at the moment. I think it's quite a wonderful instrument, in spite of the dark, dark,

almost black varnish that is on it. Now his instruments are numbered anywhere between nine and 189,

so if he used consecutive numbering, he was pretty prolific. He used all sorts of techniques for putting

the instruments together, sometimes he used grooved plates, sometimes combined with lin ings,

sometimes little bitty short linings like the guitar construction, some footed necks, some not. So, he's

kind of in a transitional stage between that antiquated style and moving towards the future. But, given

that he's working out in the middle of nowhere in the 1840's, it's very sophisticated construction. You

know, one wonders, what did he see? What was his information? Because we know he could not have

trained forma lly, and he may have been self-taught or hung out w ith someone else for a while, but it's

very hard to trace these relationships.

This is again eccentric, but I think a wonderful instrument, and so very, very, early, from 1834, made

down in Rhode Island by Peter Slocum. And there is a Slocum instrument here, apart, for you to look at,

9

including this wonderful label that he did, and I think that Chris Germain has possession of that

instrument if you want to see it. He was a barber, so he at least know how to sharpen something, I'm

sure, but by 1828 he was making instruments and advertising that he had developed a special way of

preparing wood, you know, for better vibrations, just like everyone was always thinking they had

invented. He made these cornerless models, like the Chanot instruments in France, which were designed

to not have as many interruptions to the wood fiber. His instruments do not exactly copy Chanot, he

does use a one-piece, continuous rib, but he uses the grooved plate construction, and footed neck,

There's no purfling. The sound-holes are sort of traditional, but there's no nicks in them. The scroll is

really eccentric, you should get a close up look at the one that is floating around here, but there are at

least four instruments that have appeared, and a f ifth one was just turned up recently by a guy named

Tucker, who works, I don't know what Tucker's last name is, but he works at Chris's, Reuning's shop.

Again, working in, sort of in isolation, John G or Gee Pickering, I don't know if he's related to Norman

Pickering or not, he was working up in Greenland, New Hampshire, which is near Portsmouth. He came

out of the bass viol tradition but he made violins and I guess guitars. This is the on ly known violin, 1843.

It's pretty massively overbuilt, the corners are stubby, the arching is not really great, it's got a one-piece

back with, as you can see, some pretty wild cross (crotch?)-figure grain at the bottom. The sound-holes

are not too terribly bad. He spent a lot oftime working on this peg box with these hearts, thistles and

vines, I don't know if it was a special commission, but he is working in the completely modern style. He

has the mortised neck, he's got linings, and corner blocks, so he had moved on with that idea.

Another bass viol maker, he's a guy named Moses Tooksbury (sp), he worked with Prescott during the

1830's, then he moved to Chester, New Hampshire. He made mostly bass viols and double basses, but

he did advertise violins, and here's a stray violin from 1856 which1 given that it's kind of late, It's still

retain ing a lot of those bass viol elements. The linings and the corner blocks are really, rea lly thin, and it

does have a footed neck, a really, wide, flat, bass bar, a spruce belly, but it's real ly wide grained, slab cut

back. It has traces of inked purfling but you can't even hardly see it anymore. There's an 1840 violin that

belongs to the Henry Ford Museum by Tooksbury that had tuning machines on it at one time, so he was

even carrying on that part of the bass viol tradition forward.

I definitely don't want to linger too long on this guy, Thomas Dudley Paine in Woonsocket, Rhode Island.

His instruments turn up and they are uniformly awful. He played violin in his teens, but his first

instruments were actual ly brass instruments, and he should have stayed with that, because he's very

famous in musical circles for the creation of the rotary valve, which is operated by a string linkage, It's

still used on modern French horns, he should have patented it, he would have been, you know, wealthy.

But he gave up making brasses and started making violins in the 1850's and then he was a jeweler and a

watch maker, and he kept making violins up to the 1880's and he never got any better. They're just

heavy, clunky. There's an advertisement for a well-known orchestra leader named John Stromberg (sp)

played one of Paine's instruments, you know, whatever. They're sort of modeled after French

instruments, according to some of my colleagues, but it's very heavy, ungraceful. There's a very deep

scoop along the perimeters of the plates, leaving a real ly prominent ridge. The scrolls are distinctive but

quite elegant, but the ears are rea lly long and you can see that the tip of the peg box is very elongated,

like a duck bill or something. You can spot these across the room. He's doing modern construction, and

there are some other Paines named Asa and Amasa, and I know Philip Kass has known these

instruments. Don't know their relationship but they were also working in Rhode Island.

10

Finally, we get to this first great plateau of not just good violin making in New England and Boston, but

in America, and that was with Ira White, and this is where I'm going to start to segue more into what

Chris and Ron have to say. I'll just set the stage a little bit here, and then zip through my few photos.

Two brothers, Ira Johnson White and Asa Warren White, and I still can't break the habit of referring to

Asa as "Asa)/ but his name was Warren, he always went by Warren so n l try to remember to call him

"Warren White" . If you look at Wenberg or some other early sources, you will find a lot of

misinformation about the Whites, and that's all been corrected by a mah named Edward Wall, up in

New Hampshire, and he liberally allowed me to use all his material in my article) so I hope the record is

set straight about the White brothers. Now, they are truly considered the first professional violin makers

in America, the first to model their instruments on Stradivari, Amati, Guarneri, and many of this next

generation that we're going to segue into of violin makers studied and worked with one or the other of

the brothers. There's also a misstatement, I think in Wenberg, that the father of these gentlemen, John

White was making violins, and that has been disproven. He played the violin but there's no evidence

that he actually ever made a violin, except maybe as a hobby very late in life. Ira in particular showed

great aptitude, again one of these sort of self-taught mechanics. He was working on the farm and was

good with mechanics and woodworking, and I think one of his relatives gave him a really damaged violin

and said " if you can fix this, you can borrow it and play it". And he got it all fixed up but then the relative

wanted it back, so he made patterns, and he started to construct another one. But he was doing it in

secret, because his dad didn't really approve of this, and he was using just scavenged materials f rom

around the farm and from the house, and his father discovered this one day, and finally acquiesced and

said "look1 this is what you should pursue as a career''. The whole family ultimately moved into Boston

then and he's making violins already by 1835. As I mentioned, the 30's was when we finally start to see

some violins ofthis caliber being made.

Now, here's one of his very first pieces, which is still kind of his own model. He had not yet seen a classic

Italian instrument, but in real ... it's got a very muddy, dark varnish, it's not a very informed design. Yeah,

it's better than some ofthe stuff we saw previously, and it's made completely in modern style, there's

no footed neck, or grooved plates. But the watershed comes with the arrival of a number of traveling

virtuoso violinists from Europe, starting with a couple of Belgians, Alexandre Arteau (sp) and then later

Henry or Henri Vieuxtemps, and then Ole Bull, who we see here, the great Norwegian violinist.

Thankfully, an anonymous writer in 1856 wrote in to something called The White Journal of Music in

Boston, and told this story about that when Arteau was travelling the U.S. ih 1843 he had at least one, if

not two, Strads, and that he met White, Ira White, and let him examine and measure them, and this is a

real turning point. We see his violins after that become much, much, better work, but still it's just his

own eye teaching him how to do this, he's not having any formal instruction.

So here's one of his Strad models. It's a bit large proportions but it's vastly improved over his earlier

work and I know that Ron has some pictures and also Ira Whites of this period. He was able to command

a high price of $150 for a violin at this time, which I guess was quite a lot, that reflected his ca liber as a

maker. He made a few Amati copies, but there's only a small number of instruments of his that have

turned up, altogether. He was in partnership with his brother Warren for a while, and after they

dissolved that he moved up to Malden and Melrose.

11

Warren White, he was the youngest child, we assume he must have learned some of this stuff from Ira

but he also worked with some other makers. As I say, he was in partnership with Ira. He must have been

much more prolific than Ira. There's a large number of instruments of his that are out there. Chris

Reun ing was into our museum the other day to look at some of these instruments and1 the Ira

instruments are very interesting in their way. The Asas are very professionally made, according to what

he was saying, I'll let him elaborate on that, but they're a little, I don't know, they don't have as much

character or something like that. But as I say, much more prolific. His wife died in 1879, and he moved to

Chicago, j ust for a short time, but then got back to Boston and sadly, he died in {18)94 in extreme

poverty, but we don't know the circumstances there. He had won some awards at these things, like the

Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic's Association, which is the model, the same thing as that Franklin

Institute, where people were exhibiting stuff in Phi ladelphia. He had a very active shop and a high

demand for his instruments; he really sets the standard for the Boston makers who followed. Had some

very notable apprentices, and I think, at that point, this is a patent he took out for a bow, he wasn't the

first to come up with this idea of laminated bows. He thought it should make another two or three

pieces of wood and you could get by with a lighter weight bow if it was laminated and had stiffness to

counteract the lack of weight.

That's as quick a summary as I can get through, and try to segue over to you guys, now.

(applause)

Chris Reuning

Did everybody get a handout? If not, please raise your hand and somebody will carry some around.

So Chris (Germain) was kind of a little bit too generous to me, I've been trading in Boston violins for

quite a wh ile, but I've never really been a scholar or really paid that much attention to them until he

asked me to ..... we need some handouts down here if (inaudible)

..... Until Chris asked me to speak about them. Then, I went out to Ron Midgett's house, shop actually, in

East Hampton and soon discovered that he's the Charles Beare of this New England school. He's got

workbenches, fine tools, letters, a great collection of instruments and we've spent a good deal of time, I

went to graduate school and learned something, but Ron's the rea l scholar. We've got some pictures

here and I apologize for the quality of this projector, but most of the instruments are in the next room,

and I'm going to go pretty quickly because we need to get to the next panel.

Most of the things you can learn, you can see from the instruments themselves, and the handout has a

lot of the biographical information about these guys.

12

So there's Ira White, playing checkers with his wife, he' s smiling, you can't tell. You know, what's really

interesting about Ira White is, I think we have two early fiddles that he made here, and it's clear that the

guy is a very skilled craftsman. The heads are ca rved very well, the inlays are done extremely neatly, but

he's coming out of this New England school of these bass viols, and up until the 1860 instrument, that's

in the museum that Darcy just showed us a picture of, it's still sort of weird. It's got these slanted

notches, and funny shaped sound-holes, quite bad varnish that's kind of got a sunburst red opaque

varn ish, there's no pins, there's no f luting.

He's clearly a very skilled guy but all of a sudden we get to this fiddle here in 1865. All of a sudden he's

making a very classically designed Strad model violin. The scroll is really beautiful. I think this fiddle's

here. This is Ron's violin from 18651 so somewhere between 1860 and 1865 he figured out what a real

violin looked like. I think when you see this violin, and compare that to what's being made in, for

instance, Italy, in 1865, it actually compares very well. This has some still peculiarities in the instrument,

it still has the slanted notches, it doesn't have any fluting in the wings, but it does have pins and as I

said, he's usually using American wood for the backs. It's got a pretty small button ....... .

(blank)

Ron Midgett

We' re in the first place at this time and this place. Darcy has done a great job of showing what has

led ..... , before that, articulating the particulars of the earlier Instruments that were used, not in

symphonic or orchestra settings, but in churches. And it's not until the 1840's or 1850's that the first

instruments in the Boston area are starting to be made for the intention of being used orchestrally.

Unlike the advantages that many of the European makers had, of being patronized by royalty, or state,

or that sort of thing, or factories, or even other makers that they could learn from, none of this was

available in the United States. There was this whole primordial sea started by the shock wave, I call it, of

the Industrial Revolution, which sort of emanated out of Massachusetts, tremendous hydropower, and

what this hydropower did, what technology of an era did, is the same thing that happens now, or

happened in Silicon Valley, the technologists of an era arrived, and a particu lar segment of the country,

the Industrial Revolution itself created hard-working jobs, highly skilled craftsmen, and also created

leisure time because instead of being se lf-employed as a farmer, or someth ing like that there was time.

Add to that the beginnings of the cultural yearnings of America itself, that is, as Darcy mentioned, the

first coming of Alexandre Arteau (sp) in 1843 for a tour, so there's th is building interest in both culture

and lots of craftsmen in that area. So, in the true spirit of Yankee ingenuity we see Ira White rising to the

cause. Dwight's article of December 20th, 1856, does suggest that perhaps Arteau did bring with him t wo

Strads, or two Ita lian instruments, and it begins a principle that repeats itself many times, now

throughout the next forty or fifty years, and that is the arriva l of virtuosos that possess instruments that

let Americans, who already have tremendous skills, to start using those skills and stop reinventing the

wheel; to use those ski lls to begin making from Italian master models. And it's only in 1827 or so Tarisio

wa lks to Paris with his first load and starts t o give luthiers in that area of the world a chance to grow.

Alexandre Arteau is the first example I know of where it may have actually occurred that Ira White got

to see terrific Italian instruments and thereby take himself and his skills in a direction that led to the rise

13

of the American school of violin making in that Boston area. So, if you look, I' ll go just a little further to

overview the rest of the slides that we' ll see today. If you'll consider viol ins that were sufficiently

qualified to be used in an orchestra setting, if you look at who's making them, when they're making

t hem, and the incidence of making in the period 1830 until1930 you'll see Asa and Ira, or Ira White

get ting started in the 1830's and 1840's and it makes a bell curve, very f lat. It starts to go up around

1850's, toward the 1860's there a larger incidence of makers, what happens in the United States then, is

the Civil War, it f latlines again. Then, right after the Civil War, there's th is tremendous push in the 1870's

and the 1880's, a boom of makers, and the height of it occurs, it stops, it really starts to go up around

1915 and there's a period right about 1925, and it peaks, and levels off, and then the Depression hits

and at that point a lot of makers simply went out of business, or moved to alternate locations. Some of

the big music houses in Boston dissolved and other cities began to take up more prominence but all

through the 20s there's this great school effect which we're about to continue to share with you.

Thinking in the bigger picture if there's anything more specifically about Ira ... I think I won't take any

more of our valuable time by giving you the particulars. That's part of what the freedom of having this

handout is. Look at the instruments themselves and what is so amazing that he was able to produce

without any instruction from someone else, self~taught that we know. His brother, Asa White, who

began with him about 1846, had some guitar making background from a man named Gerald Da lwin

(??????sp) . He worked for Prentiss's company, Henry Prentiss. But they stayed together, Asa and Ira, in

partnership through the 1850's until1863, when Ira moves and Asa begins taking the first ofthe people

no longer in partnership with his brother, that essentially become his apprentice who passes on and

begins the first snow fly(?????????) of what I would call schooling, (inaudible)

Darcy (?) again

..... Vieuxtemps and Ole Bull bringing instruments for people to look at but of course they' re also

inspiring the buyers, people would say, "I've never heard a great violinist before," I want it. Just like

Brittany Spears inspires kids to go on American Idol now, " I want to do that" and so there's a market to

make a violin and people want to do it, because they've seen good instruments.

C.R. going back to Ira for one second, the MFA has an 1835 violin that's the earliest viol in, so he's

making violins for thirty years before he makes this one instrument. And from then on he's making great

instruments, but he made a lot of inst ruments

??what we don't know is the number. Ira did not number all of them

C. R. I' ve seen a half dozen of them and they're all consistently in a certain way, and then all of a

suddenly, your fiddle is 1865, he' s making a rea l viol in and from that point forward he's making, then

the Boston school is really born. Now we've got Asa White, who's his brother, and he was a much more

prolific guy. But I've never seen an Asa White, they're a little bit more eccentric, though I th ink he was

much more productive. Th is is one of the nicest ones I've seen and this is made in Chicago in 189????

Th is is what's interesting, the label is his regular Boston label but ''Bost on" is scratched out and in Asa

Warren White's hand it's written, "Chicago'' , And it's a mystery, what the heck was he doing in Chicago

in 1879, 1880, right after his wife died. I've always hoped that maybe we could build a bridge that says,

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"right, he and Herman Macklett hung out together" for that time but I don't know of any way to do that.

He retreated, back to Boston, thereafter.

C.R. we cao move to the next one. The next guy is Treffle Gervais, one of the few students of Asa, right?

Of Asa. Th is violin's here, isn't it?

Yes this violin's here, he also worked with Squier and Ora Nieman (sp) who you'll hear of in a moment as

well.

C.R. So we1re going to see a lot of these Del Gesu models, I think the guy probably picked it out of a book

because you've got a lot of these instruments from this point fo rward made by these guys that all used

the same sort of model. This guy used smal l pins, he's got American wood, he's got a nice button shape,

this guy is, he's quite a bit more traditiona l t han Asa White, he's really sort of branched out from his

teacher, he following more classic designs, he's got a more textured and thicker varnish, he's got a little

bit of a slight strange arching, quite bulbous, but with nice channeling. He's got this very long scroll, you

see in his teacher, Asa White.

Go on the next one. This is Calvin Baker, do you want to talk about Calvin Baker?

O.K. Calvin Baker was, took up working with Ira White right after his brother left, in 1863. Baker

developed his own style which is quite nice. One of the features that he nearly always has is omitted

purfling beneath the button on the back, some of his instruments will also have that continuously filled

in with stamps, "C. Baker''. You can see that there. I won't spend much time with the instrument itself

because you can see it. However, I wil l add that the labels of Calvin Baker's instruments nearly always

include where the wood came from. I don' t remember what this particular label says on it but it does

say something about the wood and where it's from, which to me indicates that as instruments were

being made by American makers, they were searching for that magic bullet that is, "what is it, in the

Italian instruments, that we're hearing?" by these virtuosos. "What is it?" that we have to do, maybe it's

old wood, so they sought out wood from various buildings that had been around for centuries, it was

quite prized. I find it fascinating that Calvin Bal<er nearly always lists the source of his wood.

C.R. we ll, I think that Calvin Baker is a guy where you can really see the A.W.White influence, and he

didn't really grow too much. He made very consistent violins, over 500 instrument, I think, well anyway,

we see them a lot and they' re very peas in a pod, they're pretty much al l the same. I don't think he

branched out as much. The next guy is Edmund Franklin Bryant, who is a very interesting character; I' ll

let Ron give you the biography of this guy; he's maybe the link to the next school. The next big school is

Gould, I'm sorry, Bryant.

R.M. Edmund Franklin Bryant is 0. (Ole) H. Bryant's uncle, and Edmund Franklin is listed as being the

on ly apprentice or pupil of Ira White. So, that's an important link. We'll just leave it at that.

CR. except that, when I look at these Edmund Franklin Bryants I'm really looking at an O.H. Bryants. This

is really the link between, there are two major schools, there is the Asa White school, which we've just

covered, and then there1s the O.H. Bryant school. Because O.H. trained the next generation of makers

15

and this is the guy that sort of links the Whites to the next school. But when you look at the instruments,

and then you look at O.H. Bryant's history, I'm not sure that he really trained O.H. He was a good maker,

I've on ly seen this one, David have you seen many ofthese?

O.K.(?) I've seen, this one looks very Bryant school, that is, more like the work of O.H., the earlier ones

that I've seen have varnish and outline and features that look much more like Ira or Asa White's work.

So it exposes the challenge as it is. As someone who is interested in the history of American vio lins it's

not easy to produce the examples that you can learn from. Unlike European school maker, that has

started, learned the trade, and the first violin that they put out is an exceptional likeness to the master

or modeJ that they studied. The American makers, often you'll see over the period of their career,

because they were self-taught you'll see .... take Ira White's early violins, that look very much like the

church bass influence, and yet, a number of years later's a much finer instrument, based on a really

good model. It wasn't limitation of skills, it was a limitation of concepts of what to do with them. So

when you see an American maker's work, you have to ask yourself, "at what place in the career of this

person's making, where does this instrument stand?'' because often the early instruments don't

represent at all what was going on later.

C.R. let's go on the next one, this guy is O.H. Bryant, Ole H. Bryant, and he's the main character in the

discussion about the Boston School, because he trained, he actually had a violin making school, and he

trained, and there's a list of quite a few people who worked for him. Basica lly1 the main characters in

the next generation all were trained by this guy. There's a lot of good instruments rnade by him, there's

a very nice one in the other room.

Let's go on to the next slide. This fiddle is 1932, which a rather late one, this is David Bromberg's violin,

and it's a really, really gorgeous one. He had a very characteristic style that's pretty classical in its shape,

there's a few things he does that are unique to him. He's got a half saddle, he's got edges that are very

rounded over, sort of, I call them sausage edges, they don't have a great distinction to the crest, for

instance. This one's pinned, the early ones generally are not, He's got a sort of a thin varnish that's

usually shaded like this, but it's pretty good. The holes in the lower eyes are generally not round like a

Cremonese instrument, and the notches are quite small. But they're pretty good fidd les.

The next guy, if you want to go to the next fiddle. This is one of his students who I think is the best

maker from the Boston school. That's Peter Baltzerson. And I think that he took what he .... They're stil l

sort of identifiable as Bryant school violins but I think he's sort of gone quite a lot further than his

teacher. I'll let Ron talk about him a little bit.

R.M. well, Peter worked for hirn in 1917, 1918 and decided to branch out on his own and open his own

shop. He first took a tour in Europe, visiting other violin shops ih Europe is how it's listed and he came

back and opened his own shop, established in 1920 in Boston. So we don't know exactly what

experiences he had but he certainly had a fantastic eye, very skilled hand. Born in Norway, he didn't

begin working with violins until he was thirty years of age.

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