Meet the Maker: Carleen Hutchins

by Alan Carruth

previously published in American Lutherie #86, 2006

See also,
The New Violin Family by Alan Carruth
The Catgut Acoustical Society and the New Violin Family Association by Robert J. Spear

I first met Carleen Hutchins at the 1979 GAL Convention in Boston. I’d heard a lot about her from my teacher and friend Tom Knatt, who had been working with her for years, but she exceeded all of my expectations. The following winter I began joining Tom for the monthly drive down to Montclair, New Jersey for what Carleen called “technical violin making” sessions.

It’s hard to overestimate Carleen’s impact on the lutherie community. As one of the first women to gain a reputation as an instrument maker, she’s been an inspiration to a number of others who have been important in their own right. In helping to establish the Catgut Acoustical Society, she was one of the first people to initiate the sort of information sharing that the GAL carries on; a system that has contributed much to this “Golden Age” of lutherie. As a scientist, she was one of the pioneers in the study of musical instrument acoustics, and in editing the CAS Journal, she brought together, coordinated, and inspired the work of many others.

There always seems to be more to find out about Carleen, so when Tim suggested that I do an interview, I accepted the assignment gladly. Thus it was that I drove over to her new home in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, in a snow storm, and sat down for an interesting chat.

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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!)