Page 16 - Spring2020

American Luthier: The Art and Science of Carleen Hutchins
ments with good tone and playing qualities. Hutchins
asked Schelleng to try her “new” alto violin. Hutchins: “When he put a bow on it, he was amazed and excited because it had wonderfully expressive sounds especially in its lower range than we had ever heard from a viola before. Saunders and Schelleng became convinced I had something valid to work with, so we set to work to try and
develop the other instruments.”
Soprano Violin
The next violin was the soprano. Hutchins made the soprano from a three-quarter violin that Henry Brant had tried unsuc- cessfully to tune in that range. Hutchins: “The first soprano worked out pretty well but looked funny and didn’t have the full sound it ought to have had. I don’t think we got the plates tuned right at that range at the time. The other soprano vio- lins were lots better than that first one.”
Baritone Violin
Next came the baritone. Hutchins discovered that Dautrich had tuned his Vilonio to the right wood resonance for the baritone, so they moved the Vilonio up to this frequency. The length proved right, and it had a very good sound in that range. Later, Hutchins learned that she and Schelleng had made a mistake with the air mode in the baritone. “Initially, we got the wood mode right, but we had the Helmholtz mode way too low.” Hutchins was always quick to credit Dautrich:
“His work literally saved us years of cut and try.”12
Small Bass Violin
The small bass violin was developed next. Aspiring luthier Gordon McDonald visited 112 Essex Avenue and told Carleen about Donald Blatter, a retired engineer and bass maker who, on learning about the new violin family, offered to let Hutchins use bass parts he had already constructed, parts Blatter pat- terned after a slope-shouldered Carcassi Italian bass arched to Hutchins’ specifications. Hutchins said: “Without the help of Donald Blatter, we would have been many more years work- ing out the new violin family.”13
Mezzo Violin
In 1961, Helen Rice hosted two early concerts featuring the first five octet violins: soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, and small bass. During one of these early concerts when violin- ist William Kroll was playing his Stradivarius alongside the
12 Letter, CMH to Fryxell, April 1, 1965.
13 Schumacher Tape D, D.13.
alto, tenor, and baritone, pianist Rosita Levine, sitting in the audience, said to Kroll: “Fritz, I can’t hear that Stradivarius of yours. What’s the matter?” Levine was questioning why she could not hear the Stradivarius next to the Hutchins octet violins.
The incident got Carleen thinking that perhaps the traditional violin was no longer compatible with the new violins; it was not loud enough, for one thing. As a result, Hutchins and Schelleng began designing a “new” slightly larger violin that would become the mezzo, the violin closest in dimension to the traditional violin.
For the mezzo violin, nicknamed the “he-man” violin, Hutchins added violin strings to a 16-inch viola-patterned instrument that she had already made with violin resonances. To make it more playable, Hutchins later designed a 15-inch mezzo. Hutchins: “By measurement, this instrument has twice the power output of a normal violin. I sold it to a concertmaster some years back when we first developed it. He said he has to play every note correctly because everyone can hear him!”
Contrabass Violin
The next challenge was the big contrabass violin. To make the biggest fiddle, Hutchins studied the work of Felix Savart and “made the dimensions proportional. We made the resonant frequencies proportional to its tuning. If it were dimensional only, the large bass would have had to be 6 times the length of the 14-inch violin or 7 feet tall and the body length of the
treble only 7 inches.”14
Creating the contrabass was truly a team effort. Schelleng figured the scaling; architect Maxwell Kimball helped develop a violin-shape design; Carleen, aided by Donald Blatter, pro- vided the craftsmanship; and Stuart Hegeman produced the huge electronic testing equipment powerful enough to shake the huge 51-inch plates of spruce and maple.15
Treble Violin
The treble violin, nicknamed “treble trouble,” was the last and most difficult to make because there was no prototype for it. Using the design of a quarter-sized child’s violin, Hutchins and Schelleng figured a method to make deep ribs and then
14 Hutchins, “Acoustical Parameters of Violin Design Applied to the Development of a Graduated Series of Violin-Type Instruments,” CMH Lecture Delivered at the ASA Meeting, New York City, May 1963
15 Hutchins, “The New Contrabass Violin,” March 4, 1966, 5.
16 | Acoustics Today | Spring 2020