Posted on November 13, 2019March 7, 2024 by Dale Phillips H.L. Wild H.L. Wild by Paul Wyszkowski Originally published in American Lutherie #7, 1986 and The Big Red Book of American Lutherie, Volume 1, 2000 See also, “Out of the Basement” by Richard Bingham “A Scene from Dickens” by Steve Curtin H.L. Wild: A curiosity shop, a preserved bit of the past still alive in Manhattan. Not a museum display, not a movie set, but a place where the antiques on the shelves are for sale not as such, but as current merchandise. A real time trip. See it while it is still here. Buy some hundred-year-old veneer. Or pull together a guitar or a mandolin set from the stock of vintage woods and parts. Or you may find that this is the only place in the whole world which still has a supply of a particular fret-saw blade. Who knows what you may find here? Come on down! Betty Wild, who has recently celebrated her sixty-second birthday, is the third generation of the Wild dynasty. Her grandfather, William Wild, founded H.L. Wild (just “H.L. Wild,” no “Company”) at its present address in Manhattan in 1876. (Where the initials “H.L.” came from is not clear, but apparently at least part of the reason for choosing them was aesthetic: “H.L. Wild” fits the mouth nicely.) The original business manufactured and sold intricate wooden fretwork construction sets for models of buildings, churches, towers, and various decorative objects. Jigsaw puzzles were another major product. A copy of the 1876 catalog depicting the many different designs then available leans against the glass of a display case behind the counter. Betty shows it with obvious pride. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on November 13, 2019March 7, 2024 by Dale Phillips Controlling Strings, Wood, and Air Controlling Strings, Wood, and Air from her 1979 GAL Convention lecture Originally published in Guild of American Luthiers Quarterly Volume 8, #3, 1980 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie, Volume 1, 2000 I’d like to take a minute to tell you a story. Imagine the scent in front of a cave some 20,000 years ago. A family has just killed a bear and is skinning it and preparing the meat for food. They’ve given some of the rawhide to their young son who has made some strips to string his first hunting bow. He and his sister are sitting out in front of the cave trying to tie some of the slippery strips to the bow-stick. As they do this the boy puts one end of the stick in his mouth to hold it steady as he tightens and ties the slippery stuff. As he plucks the rawhide to check the pull he suddenly realizes he can get different sounds depending on how he bites the stick and shapes his lips and cheeks around it. This could have been the origin of the musical bow. When I told this story in Ames, Iowa, a few years ago it created quite a lot of interest. After the lecture they produced a record of someone playing the mouth bow. I now have a mouth bow that a young man made for me which is quite a challenge to try to play. Actually, we are working with the same three elements that the young cave boy had under his control: strings, wood, and air. He could vary all three of these quite easily to a certain extent. In our modern bowed and plucked strings, however, the wood and the air resonances are more or less set when the instruments are made. For years I have worked to test the effects of variations in the wood and air resonances, but it means taking the instruments apart to thin the plates or slice down the height of the ribs (on expendable instruments, of course!) Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on November 1, 2019March 7, 2024 by Dale Phillips The Truth about Temperaments The Truth about Temperaments by Edward Kottick originally published in Guild of American Luthiers Quarterly Volume 12, #2, 1984 and Big Red Book of American Lutherie Volume #1, 2000 There is a good deal of misinformation in print about consonance, dissonance, scales, harmonics, intervals, tuning, and temperaments. Even textbooks and scientific journals have gotten these subjects wrong, and I hope to correct the situation. Let us begin with the terms “consonance” and “dissonance.” These words have two separate sets of meanings, one musical and psychological, the other acoustical and physical; and they are often confused. From the musical point of view a dissonance is a combination of tones which, dictated by usage, projects a quality of restlessness, motion, direction, or instability. Dissonances want to go somewhere; that is, they want to resolve to consonances, which have, of course, the opposite effect. Consonances are combinations of tones to which we ascribe the qualities of restfulness, stability, and a feeling of arrival. Note that I have described the character of these terms as something dictated by usage, rather than as qualities inherent in the combination of tones. Since around 1450 (the beginning of the Renaissance) major and minor thirds and sixths, perfect fourths, fifths, and octaves have been considered consonances, although a distinction is made between perfect consonances (fourths, fifths, and octaves) and the others, which are imperfect consonances. Every other combination of tones is considered dissonant, including the fourth if it appears above the lowest sounding note. Music needs both consonance and dissonance. Without the latter it would be bland, dull, and lacking in direction. Although we may not think of composers such as Palestrina, Bach, and Chopin (to pull some names out of the air) as dissonant composers, there is an enormous amount of dissonance, as we just defined it, in their music. Furthermore, a dissonance is a dissonance only if we all say so. In the music of John Phillip Sousa a major chord with an added sixth (which makes a dissonant second to the fifth) is a dissonance; but in a jazz style that same combination of tones is treated as a consonance and is perceived in that way. In polyphonic music (music of more than one part) of the Middle Ages the third was considered dissonant, but around 1450 it began to be perceived as a consonance. This is an apparent contradiction only if the interval itself is considered in vacuo; but in the context of the music, medieval composers treated thirds and sixths as unstable combinations that needed to be resolved to perfect consonances, while Renaissance composers, and all those who followed up to the 20th century, considered thirds and sixths consonant and the building blocks of music. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on October 31, 2019March 7, 2024 by Dale Phillips The Hammered Dulcimer: Ancient, Wonderful, and Still Evolving The Hammered Dulcimer: Ancient, Wonderful, and Still Evolving by Sam Rizzetta from his 1984 GAL Convention lecture previously published in American Lutherie #10, 1987 and The Big Red Book, Volume 1, 2000 The dulcimer has been a strange, fascinating, and unique instrument in my life. I remember sitting at the knees of my uncle when I was three years old, listening to him play the banjo. That was just the most wonderful thing in the whole world. My mother lost a lot of pots and pans and other hardware to experimental childish banjos. I don’t remember if any of them actually yielded beautiful music, but they were a lot of fun. I couldn’t afford musical instruments, so if I wanted to play a banjo or guitar or whatever, I had to go down in the basement and knock one together. And that grew into a living building those things. When I finally heard a hammered dulcimer about twenty years ago, that was it; that was the most magical sound I’d heard in my life. It’s been downhill ever since. Although the dulcimer is very ancient in its history, it never really reached a peak of fixed design as did the violin and, to a lesser extent, the guitar. Any good violin serves any purpose that you would want to put a violin to. A guitar is a bit less universal, with the many varieties such as classical, flamenco, jazz, and flattop. Still, there is a certain uniformity to them, and they’re usually tuned identically. Not so with the dulcimer. Although it is well known and loved in many cultures, there’s a great diversity in the tuning, construction, and tone. There’s a lot of confusion over the name “dulcimer.” It really relates to the large trapezoidal instrument. The fretted instrument that many of us in recent times have called “dulcimer” truly is not a dulcimer at all but is related to the Pennsylvania German instrument called zitter (or zither) which in turn is related to the German scheitholdt. We are now very certain that all of the small plucked fretted “dulcimers” come directly from those. These fretted instruments are often called Appalachian dulcimer or mountain dulcimer or plucked dulcimer or lap dulcimer, but all those names apply to both instruments. In fact, in the Appalachians, the hammered dulcimer was a little more common than the fretted one, which was just revived by folklorists a little earlier. The fretted instrument is sometimes struck with straws or beaters, or it may even be bowed. The hammered instrument in many cultures is only plucked but it is still called a dulcimer. These days, to make the distinction clear we’re calling the smaller instrument a fretted dulcimer and the larger trapezoidal one a dulcimer, the term that has referred to it through history. Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
Posted on October 31, 2019March 7, 2024 by Dale Phillips Meet the Maker: Douglas Martin Meet the Maker: Douglas Martin by Barbara Goldowsky previously published in American Lutherie #90, 2007 The violin is about the only man-made device that is made today exactly as it has been for the past 300 years. Now, finally, a revolution may be under way, according to Joseph Curtin of Ann Arbor, Michigan, the craftsman who just recently was awarded the first MacArthur Fellowship ever granted to a violin maker. The cause of his startling statement is a balsa-wood violin that produces the powerful sound and excellent response everyone in the profession strives for. The unusual instrument’s creator is Douglas Martin, an amateur maker from Maine, who first introduced it to colleagues in July 2004. Since then, Mr. Martin’s work has sparked such enthusiasm that a special “Festival of Innovation” has been added to the Violin Society of America’s upcoming convention, from November 10–13, in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. The new program’s goal is “to explore the future evolution of the violin — to inspire makers to follow their creative dreams wherever they may lead,” according to Fan Tao, a research scientist and a director of the VSA. In the society’s most recent newsletter, Mr. Curtin, also a director, claims that the traditional violin is “obsolete,” and urges members to “judge for yourself — join in the arguments, hoot or applaud — but don’t let the revolution start without you!” Become A Member to Continue Reading This Article This article is part of our premium web content offered to Guild members. To view this and other web articles, join the Guild of American Luthiers. Members also receive 4 annual issues of American Lutherie and get discounts on products. For details, visit the membership page. If you are already a member, login for access or contact us to setup your account.
