four cellos and their humans

Some thoughts on

Cello: A journey through silence to sound
by Kate Kennedy
Head of Zeus 2024

Kate Kennedy had her fledgling career as a professional cellist thrown off track by injury, as she explained in this extract from the book, leading her to reflect on what happens when the symbiotic relation between a musician and their instrument is broken by unfortunate events. Now she explores four examples of cellists who were separated from their cellos in more dramatic circumstances, dragging her own cello around Europe to find the places and soundscapes that these earlier cellos and their humans had inhabited.

The instruments in question are, in chronological order:

• The Cristiani Stradivari, and its eponymous owner, Lise Cristiani (1827-1853), who died on an epic concert tour through the Russian Empire, covering remote locations that possibly hadn't seen a cello before. The cello currently resides in a museum in Cremona.
• A Gadigliano cello played by Hungarian composer Pál Hermann, who was murdered in the Holocaust. The cello was saved by relatives after his arrest, but the family sold it later and the author has been unable to find out what happened to it after 1952.
• A Ventapane cello played by Anita Lasker when she was growing up in Breslau. She survived the Holocaust playing a different cello in the women's orchestra at Auschwitz concentration camp. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who turns 100 this year, has also written a memoir about this. The fate of her Ventapane is unknown.
• The Mara Stradivari cello, which ended up floating in the Rio de la Plata when a ferry carrying its owner Amadeo Baldovino and his quartet sank in July 1963. (I don't understand how Baldovino could abandon the cello in search of some float to cling to - surely a cello in a wooden case floats well enough to keep the cellist above water?) It was rebuilt from fragments by W.E. Hill & Sons in London. Since then, it has served Heinrich Schiff and is now played by his alumnus Christian Poltera. It is thus the only one of the four instruments which is known to be still in active service.

The book fits my obsessions with cellos, sense of place, soundscapes really well - the main difference to what I am trying to do with my musical memoir project is that the instruments in my family - and the ones I am currently rescuing / restoring - are in a more modest price range, there are absolutely no Stradivariuses involved in my instrumental adventures (even if some of the labels pretend otherwise). As numerous examples demonstrate, the exorbitant market value and cultural significance of the famous instruments isn't doing them a good service, in that many of them are now silently sitting in museums or safe vaults, instead of playing music. On the other hand, the shipwrecked instrument certainly wouldn't have been pieced together again if it hadn't been a Stradivarius.

On a related note regarding the relation between insanely famous and common or garden instruments, the author discovered a hilarious entry in the logbooks of W.E. Hill luthiers regarding a visit by Albert Einstein and his violin in October 1933 (note 17 on page 433). The luthiers were quite disparaging about the quality of Einstein's violin and suggested that the only possible reason he might like its sound was that he had gotten used to it. In a blatantly unfair comparison, they showed him the Messiah Stradivarius (now residing in a glass case in the Ashmolean Museum) and let him bow a note on it. Still, Einstein left a happy message in their books, and didn't swap his beloved "Line" for an expensive model (although he had several through his lifetime, and the one auctioned here was probably the successor to the one the Hills saw).

Related to the Cristiani and the Messiah in their museum displays, the author shares an interesting suggestion, namely that the displays should include recorded music from the same or a similar instrument, such that they could resonate with an appropriate sound. I would sign that petition immediately. In a more understanding future, we will regard it as cruelty to keep museum instruments in permanently silent environments.

Useful things I learned from the book include the concept of whakapapa, a Maori term for genealogy including objects and locations, which reminds me of what I'm trying to do with my cello memoir and other family history endeavours. It was interesting to read about historic Breslau, as the parents of our old cellist came from there, but had left following railways job opportunities nearly half a century before Anita was born. Also handy to learn about the traditional luthiers quarter in Paris (rue de Rome, near gare St. Lazare) and the museum in Cremona (where the Cristiani cello now resides), places to visit some time, but preferably travelling without a cello.

I was pleased to see that I already have many of the cello books the author cited, but one blatant gap in my collection is the autobiography of Beatrice Harrison, who famously duetted with a nightingale (or possibly with a nightingale imitator) on live radio in the early days of the BBC. Another is Cellistinnen by Katharina Deserno (2019). Watch this space.

The cover shows the Cristiani cello (the other side of it is on the back).

counting craters

Pirate luthier adventures continued:

Violin number 24 has arrived! After 14 years of writing 24 features per calendar year for Current Biology, I've come to associate this number with happiness and a sense of achievement, so this is a milestone I am celebrating - and also an old violin worth blogging about.

I found it lying on a chair in an Oxfam shop (in the Oxfam shop, actually, the first one ever), looking as battered as the surface of the Moon and a bit dishevelled but fundamentally sound. No case, no chinrest, but three strings and an interesting looking old bow. Some of its many impact craters:

I'm wondering if somebody repeatedly dug the tip of their bow in there. Also not sure what happened on the other side of the fingerboard:

It's a bit frustrating to have an old instrument with absolutely no info on its provenance (no label or mark whatsoever), but based on the number of scratches I would guess it must be more than 50 years old. It also looks and sounds like an early 20th century European violin to my very limited experience. It also makes the name finding harder. Might have to start a series with eg female composers' names.

It came with three Dominant strings (GDA), so I fitted it out with a random E string I had and tuned it up to Baroque pitch to start playing gently. So here it is with my provisional set-up:

Within a week I coaxed it up to concert pitch (A=440) so it is now ready to play as normal. Will take it to the next session that comes up (which is actually today as it happens).

Update 17.3. Putting it in a case for the first time to take it to the session, I realised the body is a couple of millimetres longer than a standard violin. It only just fits into a standard (Stentor) case, squeezing the polystyrene a bit.

---

List of violins in the pirate luthier series:

violin 1) is the one my late aunt had since the 1930s, which got me started. After restoring it in November 2022, I played it almost every day for 14 months, until number 5) showed up.

violin 2) is a Stentor student 1 (a very widely used brand of cheap fiddles available everywhere and still being produced). I bought it very cheap on gumtree, mainly because I needed a case for number 1). It has a fault that is probably not worth repairing, see the blog entry on number 3) below. After stripping it of some accessories and spares, I am now inclined to keep it in a semi-functional state to try out experimental repairs, i.e. use it as a wooden guinea pig of sorts.

violin 3) came from a folkie friend who moved away. I put the soundpost back in its place and it has now found a new home.

violin 4) is a modern Chinese one which I bought from one musical friend and sold to another, no work needed.

violin 5) (donated by a friendly freegler) was my second favourite and the one I played in folk sessions for roughly a year until number 22) showed up.

violin 6) is the half-sized Lark which was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 7) is a skylark from 1991 which I bought on gumtree for £ 10 and fitted with a new bridge. Good enough for folk I would say. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 8) is the "ladies violin", a 7/8 skylark. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 9) is the one which needed a new bridge and a tailgut and turned out to sound quite lovely on the E string. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 10) is the broken one with traces of multiple repair attempts. I'm still gathering courage to try and fix that one.

violin 11) is the 3/4 sold by JP Guivier & Co Ltd. in the 1950s but may actually be older than that. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 12) is a full-size Lark which a freegle user kindly donated and delivered after seeing my offer. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violins 13) through to 15) I bought locally through gumtree or facebook, nothing special to report.

violin 16) is the Sebastian Klotz branded one, sadly not made by the Mittenwald luthier, but by Yamaha Malaysia, who appear to have trademarked his name.

violin 17) is the supersized violin with a very strong sound.

violin 18) is the slightly drunken but nice sounding violin from Poland, which I restored and returned to its family.

violin 19) is a Stentor student 1 violin which only needed a little TLC, and within less than a week I had it brushed up and ready to move to our local school. The most intriguing problem it had was that somebody had put in the bridge the wrong way round, with the lower slope under the G string.

violin 20) is a Stentor student 1 violin I bought via GumTree. It sounds really nice for what it is, thanks in part to a good set-up with Dominant strings. My current plan is to make this one an official Cowley Orchestra instrument.

violin 21) is a nameless student violin I bought via facebook, not quite sure what to think of it. The fingerboard is horizontal, which is all wrong and may mean there is not enough pressure on the bridge to produce a good sound.

violin 22) is the 19th century Guarneri copy, still my favourite (although I'll have to fix that crack at some point).

violin 23) is a nameless student violin I bought from a charity shop. It looks unused but had no strings, so I set it up with a set of spare strings that came with another violin. It turned out to be no trouble at all and sounds ok for an instrument that looks really cheap (with the purfling painted on).

violin 24) is the densely cratered one described above.

Balance 10.3.2025: Of the 24 violins listed above, 7 received via freegle, 3 from friends and family, 13 bought (gumtree, facebook, charity shops, cost ranging £ 10 to £45), 1 taken in for repair only and returned to its family.
Of the 23 acquired, 6 given away via freegle, 2 given to a local school, 2 sold to musical friends, 1 moved to Germany for holiday practice, 8 currently in house and ready to play, 4 in house and still broken.

List of non-violins in the pirate luthier series:

An old Irish banjo

guitar 1) is the 100 year-old one from Valencia which I set up with frets and strings and handed back to its owner.

and finally a shout-out to our family-built hammered dulcimer, which dates from 2016, long before I got any ideas about violins.

moving backwards and breaking things

I've been trying to distil the events unfolding in the US since January 20 into a reasonable narrative that remains valid during the 2.5 week production period and beyond, so I focused on the public health implications of dismantling both international cooperation and federal agencies meant to protect people. Whereas there is no telling which changes will remain and which ones won't, one thing is for sure that many people will suffer and die as a result of certain oligarchs moving backwards and breaking things, and the climate catastrophe will accelerate further, which, again, will cause more suffering and death among humans and wildlife alike.

In retrospect, why didn't the assaults on global public health and on the survival of a habitable biosphere in the early weeks of the Deatheaters takeover get a similarly energetic response from Europe to what we're now witnessing in the context of Ukraine policy? I happen to think that on a dead planet, there won't be a free Ukraine either, so protecting the planet should have been be a bit more important.

Anyhow, my trumpocalypse 2 feature is out now:

Rolling back public health

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 5, 10 March 2025, Pages R159-R161

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky (starting 22.2.2025), but for this purpose I have to post them again, outside of the thread.

Last year's thread is here .

Healthcare for women is particularly threatened after the US administration announced the departure from the WHO. The photo shows a Shakila midwife listening to the heartbeat of a pregnant woman at the mobile clinic organised by the WHO at the Garm Abak of Waras district in Bamiyan, Afghanistan. (Photo: © World Health Organization/Rada Akbar, 2015.)

a guitar from Valencia

Pirate luthier adventures continued with a detour into guitar territory:

I try to bat away most instruments that aren't from the violin family, but accepted to restore this guitar which looked really cute and was in need of frets, inlays, and a nut when it came to me. I managed to fit in all of these vaguely in the right places, so now it looks like a guitar and sounds like a guitar, although I wouldn't guarantee that all notes will be 100% in tune.

It has a maker's label, but unfortunately, a Swiss company importing the instrument from Spain insisted on sticking its own label right across the more interesting one telling us who made the instrument.

Update: Scratch my guesswork - a helpful Mastodon user from Valencia cracked the secret. The guitar maker was Jose Cortes, and you can see examples of his labels here (ignore the first image which is an unrelated label). The label reads then:

Manufactura de Guitarras /
E Instrumentos Similares /
J. Cortés /
Continuacion de Jorje Juan, D.N. /
Valencia /
(Espana)

Jose Cortes was active from around 1910 till 1930, and from 1925 the street appears under its new name as calle Joaquin Costa on his labels, so we can now confidently say the guitar is at least 100 years old. More info about him here.

I'm loving the rich decoration around the sound hole and around the edges, which looks a little bit irregular and home-made, but very charmingly so.

The instrument has now returned to its owner who has had it for more than half a century.

Update: While attempting to track down the maker in Valencia, I looked up the trader, Hug & Co, and it turns out they have an interesting history too, spanning more than 200 years, and they're still in business today. A quick look seems to suggest they traded as Hug & Co from 1905 until 1973.

Normal service obsessing about violins will resume soon, as violin number 24 has arrived on the premises this week.

a little photo album from Dörndorf

A curious little photo album emerged from the belongings of my late inlaws, with photos from Dörndorf, Kreis Frankenstein, Silesia (where the kids form the bakery grew up), but the owner's stamp is a name we don't recognise, and the only two photos of people we know have probably been added to it later. Kreis Frankenstein is now Ząbkowice County in the south of Poland.

The album is roughly half the size of a paperback book, and designed to hold around 50 photos of format 6.5 x 9 cm, which can be slotted into the pages. The rubber stamp at the front says:

Fritz Grötzner
Dörndorf
Kreis Frankenstein

At a push, the name could be Grützner, which would be a name that gives you more search results in Silesia than Grötzner. As the ink of the stamp has filled in the middle of the letter I read as an o, I can't tell whether it is open or closed, but it doesn't have a leg on the right, as the letter u should probably have.

What we get in the album is a lovely portrait of the little church of Dörndorf, where Hedwig Geppert and Paul Gellrich got married (more about the church, which was built in 1777, here):

as well as a view of a house that has Fritz's name above the door, but sadly I can't read the line below so don't know what he's selling.

The only person to have as many as three individual portraits in the album is the one shown below, so I'll guess that this is Fritz G. His portraits appear near the beginning of the album, and he may or may not be included in some of the later group photos.

Obviously, I had to pick the one with a musical instrument. Elsewhere in the album, there is also a big bass drum dangling from the back of a car that has landed in a ditch. (That accident is the most dramatic thing documented in the album.)

Most of the photos appear to be related to a road building project, and one of these has the little church of Dörndorf on the horizon, so I'll assume that the entire project was a road that led into the village and it all happened reasonably close to it. A couple of photos show a flooded landscape, but even those are related to the road building, as a pair of matching photos with and without floodwater reveals. The lorries used in the road building have number plates starting with I K, which is as it should be for private vehicles registered in Silesia. The Roman numeral I applies across Prussia (as opposed to II for Bavaria), and the letter K specifies Silesia.

In picture 21 we can read on the side of the lorry the name of a road building company involved in the works:
Hugo Jaensch Stra[ssenbau]
Jauer Fernruf 5

I have added most of the photos to a new flickr album created for this, just leaving out a couple that have too many nazi uniforms for my taste, and the three that are almost certainly later additions. The genuine ones have only the brand of the photographic paper on the back (Agfa Lupex), whereas the cuckoos come with the stamps of different shops that processed the prints.

On flickr I also have a postcard of the village, with views of both the church and the bakery.

I'm tagging this "every picture" even though there may not have been a family member in the album originally, but there must have been some sort of connection otherwise it wouldn't be here. Make this an every picture special issue.

And as always, all hints and clues appreciated.

back to the sixties

Some thoughts on

A complete unknown
(Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Columbia
out today.

I only came to the movie at the tail end of its UK release, after seeing the trailer in several Düsseldorf cinemas and finding myself compulsively putting the inherited Dylan LPs on the old record player. But I made up for that by buying the soundtrack on the day of its release (from the very lovely Truck store - support your local record store).

So, well, it's just as amazing as you'd expect after seeing the movie, and then some. I spent much of my childhood with huge black and white posters of Joan and Bob looking down on little me and the original versions of these songs shaking the foundations of our house, but haven't had much interest in Dylan since (a bit more in Joan Baez's work, but that's also a while ago, and I never saw either live). So it's been a very interesting experiment in digging up subconscious memories and emotional responses to some of these songs. I find the duets with Timothée Chalamet and Monica Barbaro as Dylan and Baez get to me the most intensely, but most tracks, even the Johnny Cash covers, ring some sorts of bells. Which reminds me also of the experience of rediscovering French chansons that I hadn't heard for decades.

Childhood trauma apart, trying to assess this as an effort to musically capture the folk of the early sixties, I find it hugely impressive. I'm tempted to say at least as good as the first time round. I have no idea how it was possible to recreate all of this so convincingly, so I'm just blown away. (Update: some answers to the how question in this excellent Making Of docu. Check this too.) On first play, listening intensely, I did of course hear there was no Bob or Joan involved. But now, playing the CD for the third time in the background while writing this, it is really easy to forget I'm listening to a covers album.

Oh, and I should mention that a US showbiz journalist sharing my name wrote a Dylan biography in the 1970s, and I received a copy of the German translation at one point as a tongue-in-cheek present from a family member. Alluding to his Jesus phase, the title calls Dylan the Messiah of rock. Maybe I should write about Dylan more often, just to confuse the AI bots. Last time the connection made an appearance was a few years ago, when somebody wrote to me for a possible endorsement of their musical memoir. Thinking they might have seen scraps of my musical memoir shared online, I did send them my address to send the book to, and at that point they must have realised they didn't have the person they were trying to contact, and didn't reply. After a few weeks without response, it dawned on me that they must have been after the Dylan biographer.

Update 1.3.2025: It appears that the posters mentioned above have died after spending time in a humid basement. Online, I think I found a copy of Joan and Bob. No guarantees as I don't have photos for comparison here, but they look right to me, and the sizes (ca 75 by 100 cm) are about right too.

forever fluorinated

Polyfluorinated alkyl substances (PFAS) aka "forever chemicals" have been in the news a lot, as they are now being found just about everywhere including in animal and human tissues. So it was about time to do a feature about them, which is out now:

Forever problems

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 4, 24 February 2025, Pages R125-R127

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

My mastodon posts are also mirrored on Bluesky (starting 22.2.2025)

Last year's thread is here .

Firefighting foams containing PFAS have been used for decades. In locations with regular fire drills, the substances have accumulated in the environment. (Photo: Senior Airman Brett Clashman, US Air Force/Wikimedia Commons.)

NB I love this photo to bits, but the things I learned about PFAS pollution produced by regular firefighting drills were downright scary. I mean I get that you make exceptions for its use in life or death situations, but apparently some places such as airports have saturated their environment by spreading the stuff every week in their drills.

my new favourite violin

Pirate luthier adventures continued:

The latest arrival in my pirate workshop, violin number 22), has immediately become my new favourite fiddle to play, so I urgently need to blog about it, skipping a couple of less interesting specimens.

This one came from a dear old friend who inherited from her husband who inherited it from his grandmother, and the story is that the grandmother played it quite seriously as the daughter of a posh family at the end of the 19th century, until she decided she had enough of being posh and married a farmer. I was told it was last played by her grandson when he was growing up in the 1960s, but to me the tailpiece and the strings look more modern than that, so I would say the setup likely dates from the 1980s. The wooden case is original though, and it is so amazing I will have to do a separate entry on that (will also keep discussion of the bow for later).

Let's start with the backside, which is just stunning :

and possibly made from as one piece as I can't find the usual seam between the two halves, although in the photo it looks like there is one. Weird.

And I'm loving the craquelé around the waist:

There are two black dots at each end of the body. A friendly luthier tells me these are the remains of pins used to hold the back in place during construction of the instrument. Typically they would be more inconspicuous when made of a matching wood and only one at each end, but here they are clearly emphasised as a feature:

Two of the pegs have a small inlay and the other two don't. Helps you tell your pegs apart in case you're easily confused? Actually, the decorated pegs are longer than the undecorated ones, sticking out on the other side way too much (14 mm for the D peg). Closer inspection of their shapes and sizes reveals they are four different models, so must have been replaced at different times.

Looking inside we have the label pretending the instrument was made by Guiseppe Guarneri del Gesu (with the cross and the christogram IHS distinguishing the mark of the younger Guiseppe from his father who was also Guiseppe Guarneri) in 1731:

Joseph Guarnerius fecit
Cremonae anno 1731 IHC

Which was the year when young Guiseppe set up his own workshop and started using the labels with the cross, as explained here. (Scroll down to the last image to see an example of a real Guarneri del Gesu label.)

So, well, I understand that makers at Markneukirchen and Schönbach in the late 19th century copied Guarneri's label at an industrial scale, so this would be the most likely explanation. One has to bear in mind that at the time when they did that, the instrument would have been shiny and new, so there was no attempt at deception, just hijacking of a famous name, like the modern maker using SebastianKlotz as a trademark.

The bridge is from Aubert.

Like my "supersized" violin number 17), the instrument is around 1 cm longer than a standard violin, just enough to make sure it doesn't fit into a modern standard-sized case. Like 17), it has a stronger sound than the standard student fiddle, but in comparison to 17), and indeed to all violins I've tried before, it has an amazingly warm and gentle sound across the register, which is why it is now my new favourite to play. I took it to a session this week and it was just perfect.

I haven't repaired anything on it yet, but it does have a crack conveniently hidden under the tailpiece, which will need patching up at some point. Before repairing that, however, I will practice the procedure on a less interesting violin and see how I manage. To finish my raving for now, here's the whole thing, top to toe:

PS I'm amazed that I can turn up at sessions with a different fiddle every week and nobody seems to notice. By contrast, when I was taking Heinrich our family cello to some sessions, he did get recognised.

Updated 4.3.2025 to add the explanation for the black dots.

---

List of violins in the pirate luthier series:

violin 1) is the one my late aunt had since the 1930s, which got me started. After restoring it in November 2022, I played it almost every day for 14 months, until number 5) showed up.

violin 2) is a Stentor student 1 (a very widely used brand of cheap fiddles available everywhere and still being produced). I bought it very cheap on gumtree, mainly because I needed a case for number 1). It has a fault that is probably not worth repairing, see the blog entry on number 3) below. After stripping it of some accessories and spares, I am now inclined to keep it in a semi-functional state to try out experimental repairs, i.e. use it as a wooden guinea pig of sorts.

violin 3) came from a folkie friend who moved away. I put the soundpost back in its place and it has now found a new home.

violin 4) is a modern Chinese one which I bought from one musical friend and sold to another, no work needed.

violin 5) (donated by a friendly freegler) was my second favourite and the one I played in folk sessions for roughly a year until number 22) showed up.

violin 6) is the half-sized Lark which was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 7) is a skylark from 1991 which I bought on gumtree for £ 10 and fitted with a new bridge. Good enough for folk I would say. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 8) is the "ladies violin", a 7/8 skylark. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 9) is the one which needed a new bridge and a tailgut and turned out to sound quite lovely on the E string. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 10) is the broken one with traces of multiple repair attempts. I'm still gathering courage to try and fix that one.

violin 11) is the 3/4 sold by JP Guivier & Co Ltd. in the 1950s but may actually be older than that. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violin 12) is a full-size Lark which a freegle user kindly donated and delivered after seeing my offer. It was one of the six violins I gave away on freegle in the first week of June.

violins 13) through to 15) I bought locally through gumtree or facebook, nothing special to report.

violin 16) is the Sebastian Klotz branded one, sadly not made by the Mittenwald luthier, but by Yamaha Malaysia, who appear to have trademarked his name.

violin 17) is the supersized violin with a very strong sound.

violin 18) is the slightly drunken but nice sounding violin from Poland, which I restored and returned to its family.

violin 19) is a Stentor student 1 violin which only needed a little TLC, and within less than a week I had it brushed up and ready to move to our local school. The most intriguing problem it had was that somebody had put in the bridge the wrong way round, with the lower slope under the G string.

violin 20) is a Stentor student 1 violin I bought via GumTree. It sounds really nice for what it is, thanks in part to a good set-up with Dominant strings. My current plan is to make this one an official Cowley Orchestra instrument.

violin 21) is a nameless student violin I bought via facebook, not quite sure what to think of it. The fingerboard is horizontal, which is all wrong and may mean there is not enough pressure on the bridge to produce a good sound.

violin 22) is the 19th century Guarneri copy described above.

Balance 22.2.2025: Of the 22 violins listed above, 7 received via freegle, 3 from friends and family, 11 bought (gumtree, facebook, charity shops, cost ranging £ 10 to £45), 1 taken in for repair only and returned to its family.
Of the 21 acquired, 6 given away via freegle, 2 given to a local school, 2 sold to musical friends, 1 moved to Germany for holiday practice, 5 currently in house and ready to play, 1 needs setting up, 4 still broken.

List of non-violins in the pirate luthier series:

An old Irish banjo

harmony and symphony

Some thoughts on

En Fanfare
Emmanuel Courcol
France 2024
in German cinemas now as: "Die leisen und die großen Töne"

The Union Musicale de Walincourt is the band of a former mining town in the north of France (doesn't appear to be related to the real Walincourt in the Dept. Nord, which didn't have mining), where the last major factory is closing down and being dismantled. Accordingly the band or "harmonie" isn't all in harmony either and is threatened with extinction after the conductor is forced to work abroad. The story revolves around a major culture clash as an internationally famous conductor of major orchestras finds out he's the biological brother of one of the band members.

So it is a bit of Brassed off among the Ch'tis, with a lot of classical music making thrown in as well, and a medical/family drama stitching the bits together. I wouldn't normally consider a film about two blokes finding out they're brothers or exchanging tissue samples, so I'm really only looking at the musical bits here and they were amazing. Very convincing portraitures of the different musical worlds, how they seem to be lightyears apart, but then, with a bit of effort, one can bring them together.

Although IMDB lists "The Marching Band" as an English title, there's only a few seconds of marching involved, thankfully. (For more marching and outdoors musical mischief watch Tambour battant, CH 2019.) Watch out for Anne-Sophie Lapix playing herself in the evening news of France 2, and for a flashmob performance inside an official musical event ...

Compared to my own experience in UK ensembles, the harmonie members in the film are amazingly rude to each other - guess that's in part just the Ch'ti culture as opposed to Oxford privilege and politeness, so I'm hoping that won't put anybody off from joining their local band or amateur orchestra. Do sign up now while these things just about exist ...

source

mind the gender gap

Some thoughts on

A History of the Roman Empire in 21 Women
Emma Southon
Oneworld 2023

One of my Latin teachers at school was a textbook case of testosterone poisoning, so on top of all the manliness in the ancient sources, he had to add an extra layer of testosterone with his made-up example sentences. I've always loved the language for its mathematical clarity and studied it for six years (against the wishes of my parents), but the male chest-beating and gender imbalance was less appealing to me. And then I went on to study sciences rather than Romance languages, Latin memories took a back seat. Nearly 30 years later I had the chance of revisiting the buried knowledge when one of my daughters became interested in learning Latin. As the course which the school had promised didn't materialise, I taught her to GCSE.

Now, another decade later, with a reasonably refreshed memory of all the manliness in the works of Caesar, Livius, Tacitus et al., I found it extremely enlightening to learn about 21 women who also shaped Roman history but somehow weren't mentioned in our school books. Or if they were mentioned, they only served as an trigger to launch men into action. Like a jigsaw that was previously missing half the pieces, Roman history makes a lot more sense with this addition. I'm only amazed this hasn't been done a generation earlier. While there are biographies of some of the women featured here, there is no work on Roman history across the 11 centuries until the fall of the Western Roman Empire where the significance of women is mentioned in any significant way. (At least Southon says she couldn't find any.)

Headline stars of the chapters include Augustus's daughter Julia (but not his wife Livia, who starred in the recent TV series Domina), four other Julias, the Brits Cartimandua and Boudicca, as well as the Syrian princess Zenobia. So we do get to travel the Roman world as well, with interesting insights into the more remote territories.

Even with the testosterone toned down, the history still contains a lot of senseless slaughter though. One of the other things that have changed since I went to school is that nowadays, classicists write about the ancient world without mincing their words regarding how batshit crazy many of the key events were. The overall tone is a bit like: What can you expect from a city founded by a guy who just murdered his brother. Family values and all that.

Southon's writing is very 21st century with generous pop-cultural references and swearwords, but I guess the Roman men who defined the history as we used to learn it in the 20th century deserve the reckoning that they get here - they were just effing insane and probably had way too much testosterone.

Blackwells

homo migrans

It is a sad irony that the current wave of (populist, racist, fascist etc) sentiment against people who migrate from one part of our planet to another comes at a time when genetics enables us to better understand humanity's past migrations, and to appreciate that humans have always been migrants. They may stick around for a few generations if the living conditions are favourable, but in the long term, across centuries, all human ancestries have a migration background (the more interesting parts of mine are in the 17th century).

The current anti-migration populism is all the more tragic as the ongoing climate catastrophe is already displacing people and will displace millions more. As Gaia Vince has argued in her excellent book Nomad Century, migration should be embraced as an essential part of the adaptation to climate change, rather than vilified.

All of which provides good enough reasons to add another feature to the ones I have already written about the many migrations of the past. This time the focus is on Europe in the first millennium CE, but inevitably, given the current political meltdown, it is also about the present and future of humanity:

Migration in our genes

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 3, 3 February 2025, Pages R81-R83

Restricted access to full text and PDF download
(will become open access one year after publication)

Magic link for free access
(first seven weeks only)

See also my new Mastodon thread where I will highlight all this year's CB features.

Last year's thread is here .

Even before the Viking invasions, European populations migrated over long distances. This nineteenth-century painting is Viking Armada by Edward Moran (1829–1901). (Painting courtesy of The Knohl Collection.)

cities, towns and villages that got away

Lost cities season 2: epilogue

In the lost cities series I have been introducing 22 towns and cities where some of my ancestors (and one set of inlaws) used to live for extended periods of time. In 20 cases the relevant people were resident in the 20th century, only two of these places were already "lost" in the 19th. Twelve of the places were then or are now "big cities" in the sense that a "Großstadt" in Germany is defined as a city of more than 100,000 residents. The series was somewhat biased towards places I find interesting in the respective time and/or in the shape I can visit today.

There are of course many other places popping up in my family tree that may not meet these arbitrary selection criteria - they may be too small, too distant in time, too uninspiring or maybe I just haven't quite figured out yet what their attraction is. The lost cities I selected are often tinged with a tiny bit of nostalgia for a place & time combination that was right for at least some time.

Here are some other places that didn't make the cut. First some that I have introduced before in a different context, and perhaps they weren't quite interesting enough to motivate a repeat appearance. Come to think of it, this list may well evolve into a third series of past places, perhaps dropping the "cities" label (most recent stays first, end years bold):

• Peter and Frieda lived at Gronau from 1926-1932. I've shared a photo of Peter at the relevant border crossing here. Their second daughter was born on the Dutch side of that border.
• Julius and Helene lived in many places - I've shown their shop in Luisenthal (Saar) here. The family stayed there from 1911 to 1918. After which they made the fundamental error of moving to the countryside. It didn't last long.
• Adamsweiler, where our old station master Christoph Kauer worked until his death in 1909, was a cute little station but it is sadly in the middle of nowhere. I visited the station once in the 1980s and have no memory of the village, I think it is essentially a through road with a dozen houses. Among the previous stations where he worked, Mülhausen/Mulhouse is the biggest and most interesting city (just over 100,000 now), and the village of Fontoy/Fentsch may also be worth looking at, as it's the birthplace of Helene.
• Simmern must have been a great place before 1689, but never recovered from the attention of Louis XIV, as I have written previously. 3/16 of my DNA comes from the town and the surrounding villages since the dawn of time (ie at least since the 15th century), see the map below. In the 1870s, the Kauer and the Imig Clan left Simmern behind in the name of progress, and I am sure that was a good move. (As mentioned in the Imig Clan entry, some Imigs were among the families who tried to emigrate to the New World in the 18th century and only got as far as the lower Rhine area, I just love that story, need to do a dedicated blog entry for that some time.) Shoemaker Matthias Kauer was the last ancestor to die in Simmern, in 1885. He's also the second oldest one of whom we have a photo.
  

  Map of the villages around Simmern where just under a quarter of my ancestry has been living for centuries. The numbers on the red dots indicate how many ancestors are known to have been born in a given location. Not sure where the original map came from, I only have a colour photocopy or printout of what must have been a much larger map probably dating from the late 20th century.

• Steel workers from Wallonia moved to Fachbach on the river Lahn in 1672 - they stayed there for several generations and form a significant part of the ancestry of the de la Strada family that settled in Krefeld after 1776. I wrote about their migration history here.
• I wrote about the miners migrating to Sainte Marie aux Mines (Markirch) before 1732 here. The notoriously un-googlable Paul Simon moved on to get married in Böchingen in 1768.
• I mentioned the high school at Trarbach (Mosel) here, where two generations of Ebner ancestors were teachers in the late 17th / early 18th century. The older teacher was born at Trarbach in 1646 in a family of refugees from Hungary - not clear from when they were resident in Trarbach. The younger of the pair died 1734, but his wife survived him and remarried, so it is unclear how long she remained present at Trarbach. His daughter married a pastor who ended his career as the vicar of the small village of Eckweiler (157 residents then, wiped out in 1979), leading to a descent of our lineage into a more rural environment in the following generations. The Ebners had at least seven children, so it may be worth checking the others and setting up a Trarbach Clan (in the meantime, see this GedBas file). So very roughly, we're looking at 1646 to 1734, just because these are the data points we have. In 1904 Trarbach on the right bank of the Mosel was merged with Traben on the left bank to form Traben-Trarbach which today has just under 6,000 residents. OK, having said all this, Trarbach may be a candidate for a third series with smaller towns hidden deeper in the past.

Some make too transient an appearance to leave a permanent impression

• Richard studied at Vienna and Göttingen before arriving at Bonn. I don't recall any Viennese memories but he did talk about famous Göttingen profs such as David Hilbert (1862-1943).
• Peter and Frieda also lived at Hamm for a year around 1933. I know nothing about Hamm, but it is very well connected on the railway network. It also has a direct Regional Express connection to Düsseldorf-Bilk (the RE6 to Minden). That brings the total to seven. Good enough reason to visit the place?
• Zella St. Blasii, today part of Zella Mehlis, population 12,400, was the birth place of Heinrich the cellist, but it was only a stepping stone in the itinerary of his father Richard the railway man. Although Heinrich spent the rest of his life being labeled a Thuringian because of his birthplace, to the best of my knowledge nobody ever shed a tear for the memories of Zella St. Blasii.
• Maria Luise Mentzel, Heinrich's mother, died at Magdeburg in 1916, three years after her husband died at Tangermünde where they had lived since 1888. I'm guessing she may have moved to Magdeburg to live with her daughter Gertrud, but I'm not sure as I have no evidence either way.

Many of the places (especially in the earlier family history) were simply too small for my tastes

• Dieuze is Richard's birthplace but we have to remember that his father's regiment was sent there as a punishment for unspecified misbehaviour while they were stationed in Strasbourg. It was a tiny village with absolutely no claim to fame.
• Schwaney has an amazing musical tradition but has never been more than a village (current population 2000). Frieda's grandfather from Schwaney died before she was born, so there wasn't any chance of a transfer of that musical culture. Unless they have it in their DNA ...
• Münzesheim isn't much bigger and became part of the new town of Kraichtal. Similarly, many other relevant places around that area are just villages, such as Elsenz, which is now part of Eppingen. The most interesting thing about them is that the area was comprehensively depopulated in the Thirty Years War and resettled in the second half of the 17th century by immigrants from Switzerland (my immigrant ancestors are listed here), which due to its long lasting peace and prosperity had a relative population overload.
• Similarly, the ancestry of the Lorsch family is scattered around Odenwald villages which are all too small to be featured here. Some have a long history, such as Zotzenbach, which was first mentioned in 877, so is due to celebrate its 1250th birthday soon. It is now part of Rimbach. Maybe I should pick one representative out of the crowd of small places. The area also had a population bottleneck after the 30 Years War, meaning that everybody with ancestry in that region is probably related to my mother and to Grace Kelly.

Your guide to the complete #lostcities series:

1. Elberfeld / Wuppertal 1919 - 1961
2. Strasbourg 1901 - 1908
3. Minden 1903 - 1952/ca.1970
4. Tangermünde 1888 - 1916
5. Rheydt 1923 - 1935
6. Königsberg 1935 - 1945
7. Aachen 1936 - 1940
8. Idar-Oberstein 1940 - 1962
9. Bad Nauheim 1945 - 1972/1983
10. Würzburg 1961 - 1968
11. Hamborn inlaws: 1922 - 1979/2015
12. Bonn 1929 - 1934
13. Lorsch 1890 - 1938/1973
14. Krefeld 1764 - 1924/current
15. Gütersloh 1825 - 1928/1950s
16. Breslau 1830 - 1877
17. Bad Münster 1919 - 1930/1952; Bad Kreuznach 1945 - 1951
18. Bruchsal 1889 - 1909/2023
19. Idstein 1714-1804
20. Freiburg 1928-1930, 1957-1961
21. Münster 1928-1929, 1934-1936

and once more in chronological order, sorted by the year in which the city was lost to my direct ancestors:

• Idstein 1714-1804
• Breslau 1830 - 1877
• Strasbourg 1901 - 1908
• Bruchsal 1889 - 1909/2023
• Tangermünde 1888 - 1916
• Krefeld 1764 - 1924/current
• Gütersloh 1825 - 1928/1950s
• Bad Münster 1919 - 1930/1952;
• Bonn 1929 - 1934
• Rheydt 1923 - 1935
• Münster 1928-1929, 1934-1936
• Lorsch 1890 - 1938/1973
• Aachen 1936 - 1940
• Königsberg 1935 - 1945
• Bad Kreuznach 1945 - 1951
• Minden 1903 - 1952/ca.1970
• Elberfeld / Wuppertal 1919 - 1961
• Freiburg 1928-1930, 1957-1961
• Idar-Oberstein 1940 - 1962
• Würzburg 1961 - 1968
• Bad Nauheim 1945 - 1972/1983
• Hamborn inlaws: 1922 - 1979/2015