Quincy Whitney

This is a surprsingly engaging book about violin making. Carleen Hutchins was an innovator in the making of stringed instruments. She resisted the Stradivarius encampment, and developed her own abilities to create violins for the modern era. Especilly striking is the creation of a violin octet, eight violins ranging from a very small violin up to a large double base. The first five to be made were soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, and small bases violins. Then came the mezzo (to somewhat match the regular violin); the contrabass (the largest string), and finally the treble violin (the smallest - akin to a quarter size child's violin). The purpose was to have a fuller set of sounds to balance somewhat what a piano could do. Hutchins saw four areas of research made her violin family possible: 1) the placement of the main wood and air resonances, 2) tap-tone relationships, 3) methods of putting resonances at desired frequencies, and 4) dimensional scaling.

I've listened to some of the Hutchins Consort efforts on Youtube and was quite impressed with one called Hutchin Consort - Ozark, which displayed a rich palette of sound. The sound seems brighter to what I normally hear at concerts. Perhaps, this is the result of Hutchins' scientific analysis of sound and insrumentation. One comment I would make is that each player has to equal ability to pull off a good concert, as there is no received practice as to how to handle this mix of parts with uniform ability.

The 21 chapters are arranged under intersting musical notations: Exposition, Retrograde, Stretto, Pedal Point, Augmentation, Sequence, Inversion, Coda. These are divided up with a series of smaller Intermezzos. The book and the theme of the violin octet rows on you as yoe read Hutchins story and the many asides.… (mais)

A fascinating book for its insight both into the science of music and into the life of an American woman scientist of the mid-20th century. I knew I would love it from the moment I randomly opened the newly arrived book to find an anecdote about Carleen Hutchins's time as a science teacher at a private high school, when the new headmistress giving a tour of the school was dumbfounded to find that Hutchins (having had a babysitter bail on her) had pressed a rabbit hutch into use as a makeshift playpen for her toddler.

Unfortunately the book's arrangement alternates chapters about Hutchins's life with chapters about the history of music in general and (when the history finally gets to the point of the invention of violins) the violin in particular. I got the impression that Quincy Whitney wanted to use every scrap of her research, but foisting it upon the reader in the form of periodic information dumps was not the best way to do it. The information should have been integrated into the biography, or omitted from the text altogether. While Whitney clearly has a deep understanding of Hutchins's work and has mastered its scientific and artistic background, her historical scholarship, especially with regard to antiquity and the Middle Ages, is not as profound. Moreover, the alternation between life story and history disturbs the flow of the narrative to the detriment of the book. I would, and have, enthusiastically recommended this book to any musician or music lover, but with the caveat that the historical interludes are better ignored.… (mais)

I received a free copy of American Luthier as part of Librarything's Early Reviewer group.

This book is a biography of Carleen Hutchins, a woman who became a world class violin maker in what was a male world and someone who did her best to push the violin making world from the practice of "we've always done it this way" to scientific experimentation and understanding how and why the violin works the way it does. (Note: In this review, when I use the word violin, I am referring to the whole violin family. Hutchins is possibly better known for the other instruments in the family that she made.)

I requested this book because I am interested in history, music and science, and this book sounded like it would cover all three of these areas. So, how did it do for me?

The book covered the history of the violin in great detail, and probably more detail then I cared about. A lot of it was, at best, peripheral to Hutchins and her life.

I know a fair bit about music but my knowledge of the violin world is only theoretical. This book did little to tell me more.

One of Hutchins major claims to fame is tying science to the violin world. Most of the science in this book went unexplained. As an example, there were multiple references to Chladni patterns and the fact that Hutchins used them in tuning various parts of the violin. There was no picture in the book of a Chladni pattern and after reading the book, I still have no idea what she was looking for or how she was using them.

Of course, the major question with biographies is, do you feel like you know the person after reading it? With this book, my answer is yes and no. Carleen Hutchins sounds like a fascinating person. I enjoyed reading the first third or so of the book which covered her life into her thirties, and her children up to their teens and preteens. At that point in her life, she got very serious in the violin world. The children and her husband dropped out of the book and we were told that Hutchins went to this meeting, she published this paper, she built this violin. I found this half of the book to be overly dry. At the end of the book, near the end of her life, Hutchins' husband starts having health problems and he and the kids re-appear as does my sense of Hutchins as a person. Her husband dies a few years and a few pages later, and Hutchins lives another decade and a couple more chapters. I liked the "story telling" at the start of the book and the end. The big chunk in the middle was a bit of a slog to get through.

Perhaps my hopes for this book were too high. I'm afraid I'm going to have to give it a C. Two and a half stars out of five.… (mais)

Carleen Hutchins, a remarkable woman of science and invention was formally educated as a teacher. Her early interest in music evolved into fundamentally understanding the physics of the production of sounds from the violin family of instruments. Carleen developed and then mastered the skills to design and build violin-type instruments and went on to educate many others in the science of violin design. Reading this book from an engineer's perspective I came away with a deep appreciation of the efforts and struggles Carleen experienced trying to capture and then improve the sounds produced by carving, assembling, testing, altering and retesting every intricate component of the violin. Quincy Whitney has revealed, in this book, some of the unique history of a relatively unknown woman who should be introduced to the masses as a hero of hard work, focus and scientific thinking.… (mais)