Page 12 - Spring2020

American Luthier: The Art and Science of Carleen Hutchins
Apprentice to Violinmaking: The First Viola
By February 1947, married and pregnant with her first child, Carleen was in great need of something to occupy her mind and hands besides teaching. After close examination of her $75 viola, Carleen decided to try to make one. Astonished, Helen Rice tried to convince Carleen that it was an “impossible task” for anyone untrained in the art of violin making. Hutchins: “I agreed but decided I was going to try and make one anyway.”
Encouraged by her husband Mort, Carleen obtained the book Violinmaking: As It Was and Is by Heron Allen and a blueprint for a viola and purchased the wood she would need for her
first viola. Carleen christened her first viola SUS 1 (Figure 2).
Hutchins: “Since there had been a bargain of a viola for a pig, it seemed quite natural the instrument be christened SUS — especially in light of the pig’s outstanding voice production, which, alas, was not true for that first viola!” Henceforth, every Hutchins instrument carries with it the prefix SUS, from SUS 1 to at least SUS 485.
One evening in 1949, when Carleen brought her viola to a chamber music evening, Helen was hosting a group of profes- sional musicians playing quartets, among them Broadus Erle, first violinist for the New Music Quartet. Erle was playing a
Figure 2. Carleen Hutchins carving fiddles in her kitchen, circa 1955. Photo by Russell Kingman, courtesy of the Hutchins Estate.
violin made by Karl Berger and suggested that Berger might be willing to take a look at Carleen’s viola.
Carleen recalled her first viola: “It had many coats of varnish, but it had a nice color and played better than the Hornsteiner. I was quite happy with it and really proud of the work.”
Berger looked it over, tapped on it, blew inside it, felt it, put a bow on it, and asked permission to help make it sound better. Carleen: “To my astonishment and horror, he took the strings off and the bridge down, took a knife and went all around under the edge of the top plate, then he handed me the pieces. I was so upset I hardly knew what to say. Here was two years’ work all back in little bits again!”
Eventually, Carleen’s curiosity got the better of her. After the shock wore off, she began recarving the plates, following Berger’s instructions. When she took it back to him, she was excited that the reassembled viola sounded a great deal better.
Apprentice to Acoustics: The Experiments
Sometimes the less likely the meeting, the more magical the encounter.
By May 1949, it had been roughly six months since Carleen had taken her first viola to Berger. Helen Rice and violist Louise Rood had proposed that Carleen accompany them to meet Frederick Saunders, a physicist and string player, with orders to bring her precious viola along. (Saunders was a charter member of the ASA and one of its early presidents.)
Saunders tapped around on the instrument, blew in the f-holes, and listened to it. Then he said, “Young lady, I shall be interested to see your next one. At the time, I had no plans to make another one!”1 Hutchins realized that Saunders had never been able to change the wood of the box or test any- thing but finished instruments and thought he could use instruments he could cut into. Saunders didn’t think much of the idea. “He said that looked like an awful lot of work: ‘What luthier is crazy enough to make instruments that would be destroyed?’ I said, ‘I will!’”2
1 Carleen M. Hutchins (CMH) Personal Interview, 1997. 2 CMH Personal Interview, 1997.
12 | Acoustics Today | Spring 2020