violins to go

Pirate luthier adventures continued ...

I think the violin population is at its peak now. On Thursday I posted an offer on freegle to give away four of the nine I have, and the first thing that happened was that somebody kindly dropped by another one this morning, so I'm now at ten, but based on the responses I had I think I can rehome six of them over then next few days. Two are staying indefinitely and two are not playable yet.

The first one to leave the premises may be the 3/4 violin shown above in its unrestored state, logbook number 11, which didn't need any serious work. I just sanded off some grime from the bridge, swapped around some strings, swapped the old wooden case for one that's not quite so ancient and more functional, and added a 3/4 bow that came from another freegler. And a pack of rosin. I am quite sure I'll never have to buy violin rosin again.

Update 1.6.: Violin 11 has now found a new home. I think the package ended up containing items from 5 different people - not counting the strings. Heaven knows where the strings came from, but I've been lucky that some of the violins came with strings to spare so I only ever had to buy one set, for the very first one.

I am keeping the old wooden case, considering to strip off all the black stuff and keep it as bare wood - may need some gluing and infilling in places, see how it works out. After the swap the case is now paired with the broken neck violin, which is the only other 3/4 I have, so no particular hurry for it to get ready as long as the fiddle is in pieces.

Inside the case there is a label from J. P. Guivier & Co, the violin shop I walk past on my routine trip from Marble Arch to St. Pancras (since the X90 service disappeared which stopped more conveniently in Marylebone/Baker Street). So on my last trip to the continent I dropped in and asked if they could tell me anything about where the violin might have come from, but they couldn't. Turns out they mainly resell used instruments so it could have been old already and could have been from anywhere. They admitted that they might have made the case for it though. They do have an interesting history page on their website. Turns out the founder's father Jean Prospere Guivier played the ophicleide and moved to London. The founder Joseph Prosper Guivier left England and the company in 1886. As they only became a Limited Company in 1952, the label in the case can be no older than that (I would have thought the case looked older, actually).

Previously 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). 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. Currently it is sporting a brand new tailgut which I made from an old cello C string.

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 5) (donated by a friendly freegler) is my new favourite and the one I currently play in folk sessions.

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.

violin 9) is the one which needed a new bridge and a tailgut and turned out to sound quite lovely on the E string

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 one described above

finding refuge at Brase

Every picture tells a story, season 3, picture 20 (also number 100 overall!)

I'm running out of Gellrich pictures so instead here comes Hedwig Geppert in her incarnation as a Geppert by marriage (and widowed). She appears in the first picture second from right, and we don't know anybody else, so presumably that's the family she worked and stayed with at Brase, Lower Saxony, after being evicted from Silesia. The hamlet is today part of the town of Neustadt am Rübenberge and has a population of 116.

I love the way the series then zooms in on the most important personalities, ie the children and their pets:

Should anybody have any answers to some of the many questions I am raising in this series, please leave a comment here (I'll need to vet it, so it may take a few days before it goes public) or contact me at michaelgrr [at] yahoo [dot] co [dot] uk

Navigation tools:

Season 3 so far:

1. family holiday
2. play time
3. fashion show
4. bakery to butcher's shop
5. the Hamborn brotherhood
6. all grown up
7. sisters in the snow
8. the last holiday
9. village life
10. family reshuffle
11. push bike
12. mystery trio
13. confirmands at Hamborn
14. streets of Hamborn
15. more grandchildren
16. a Russian winter
17. a confectioner's business
18. a lovely hat
19. the Geppert family and associates
20. finding refuge at Brase

The Mastodon thread for season 3 is here.

You can find Season 2 entries in this thread on Mastodon (complete now!) or via the list at the bottom of the last entry of the season (and also at the bottom of the first entry of this season).

The twitter thread for season 1 is still here. Alternatively, visit the last instalment and find the numbered list of entries at the bottom.

abstract comparisons

I saw two amazing exhibitions on my recent visit to Düsseldorf, will rave about both in separate entries, starting with the one that is still running in case anybody out there gets the idea to go and see it:

Hilma af Klint und Wassily Kandinsky Träume von der Zukunft 16.3. — 11.8.2024

The exhibition at the Kunstsammlung NRW (K20) compares and contrasts the abstract paintings of Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) and Hilma af Klint (1862-1944), who were near contemporaries and developed similar kinds of abstraction at around the same time - but independently of each other. There are all the obvious conclusions to draw from the fact that the male artist was successful in his lifetime whereas the female pendant was discovered long after they both died.

To me personally, the intriguing thing though was the contrast of the very familiar and the unknown. Kandinsky is very much the kind of art I grew up with, seeing the Folkwang Museum and the Kunstsammlung NRW were within daytrip distance. I don't have a record of my childhood exposure, but a lot of his work just looks like home to me. The most recent exhibition of his work I have seen before this one was at the Von der Heydt Museum in Wuppertal in 2004: "Wassily Kandinsky: Der Klang der Farbe 1920-1921".

By contrast, I remembered Hilma af Klint's name only because it featured in a recent novel I read, namely Bed bug by Katherine Pancol. This French novel is set mainly in New York and it mentions the 2018/2019 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum which made Hilma af Klint postumously famous. The author couldn't really have known that the show would be such a success, as the novel appeared in the same year when it was on.

Her work very much feels like a foreign country - the colours and shapes are all different from what I'm used to in abstract art, but still it is all very interesting and intriguing. I am wondering how she arrived at all those shapes that are eerily reminiscent of molecular orbitals, long before quantum theory suggested those shapes for the clouds of electrons holding molecules together. There were some very impressive huge format paintings as well, and we overheard a helpful tour guide explaining how she painted those after placing her canvas flat on the floor. Long before Jackson Pollock, as the guide pointed out.

I'm loving the irony that a museum in Stockholm declined to accept her work as a gift in 1970, citing the parallels with Kandinsky as a reason for the rejection. So, well, see for yourself.

a polar bear on holidays

Every picture tells a story, special edition.

Two years after I posted the photo of Heinrich and Maria and their friends posing with a fake polar bear I spotted another old photo with a similar bear posted on flickr by a collector of old photos. Here's a zoomed-in partial view of my earlier photo to remind you:

An exchange with the collector taught me that there are many of these photos, spanning from 1920 to 1970. There is a flickr gallery, and there has been an exhibition in Arles, accompanied by a book, reported in a Guardian article I missed when it came out, which was accompanied by another online gallery of bear photos.

Update 20.6.2024: Here's a new photo gallery of white bear pics taken in Zakopane, Poland.

All very exciting, but as far as I can see no clear answer re. how and why this fad arose. May just have been a business model for buskers?

I guess the polar bear makes marginally more sense in the context of a skiing resort, but there are others taken at beaches, at dance events, and with marching soldiers, so those polar bears do seem to get around a lot.

Quite a few of the flickr pics I liked had disabled sharing, but here's a few that should work - that bear does know how to have a good time:

all about sand

Ahead of the (Northern hemisphere) summer holiday season, I've had a look at the problems around the supply of sand both for beaches and for the concrete infrastructure growing alongside them. The resulting feature is out now:

Trouble on the beaches

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 10, 20 May 2024, Pages R473-R475

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 .

Sandy beaches popular with many millions of holiday makers may look like a permanent natural feature, but many of them need replenishing with sand transfers. (Photo: maczopikczu/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 3.0 Deed).)

a bridge and a tailgut

Pirate luthier adventures continued ...

The second violin I obtained via Freegle (number 9 in my logbook) came from outside Oxford and was very kindly delivered to my doorstep. It is a Chinese one from the 1960s and came with its original case and two hairless bows. It was lacking the bridge and the tailgut so I had to cut a new bridge, which is an enjoyable job to do. A lot of the filing and scraping is compatible with multitasking, so I watched the news and a movie while doing this. When the bridge was in a reasonable shape (I can always sand and scrape it a bit more at a later point but I was impatient), I set it up with a set of spare strings that came with the pair of SkyLark violins I bought recently. (There were only three strings in the case of this one and two of them were gut strings.) So now it looks quite lovely:

Building bridges is always a very satisfying job to do ...

I made the new tailgut from an old gut string that came with Heinrich the cello:

Note that the body is slightly thicker than the other violins I have. In fact the measures are identical to the 14" primavera viola I have, so I wondered whether this one was also meant to be a viola. I am told however, that it was only ever used as a violin (many years ago), so I also set it up as a violin. At first playing, it sounds surprisingly nice, even with a nondescript set of old strings. I am particularly impressed by the warm sound on the higher register - coming from the cello I have high expectations for the range where both instruments overlap, but don't expect to be wowed by the E string. Will share a video at some point. The attempt to record the same tune with all four violins for comparison taught me that it's a bad idea - I kept hitting the neighbouring strings as there are very subtle differences in the string height apparently.

On the label I first ignored the text in the round stamp, or maybe misread it as Shanghai. Only after the violin had settled in and sounded surprisingly good, I wondered again who made it and looked at the label again, and it says HsingHai - which I understand is a major manufacturer of all kinds of instruments, famous for pianos among other things.

So now I still need to rehair those bows:

 

This is the fifth violin I have managed to make playable (see details and links below). Two are now available for anybody who would want to play them - one for free and the other for a fee covering my costs. One has already been rehomed, one I'm playing myself and one stays for family history reasons. Update 30.5. Have now put up an offer on freegle to give those two away plus two fractional ones.

Previously 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). 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. Currently it is sporting a brand new tailgut which I made from an old cello C string.

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 5) (donated by a friendly freegler) is my new favourite and the one I currently play in folk sessions.

violin 7) is a skylark from 1991 which I bought on gumtree for £ 10 and fitted with a better bridge. Good enough for folk I would say.

violin 9) is the one discussed above

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

it's WNBR season again!

The UK's World Naked Bike Ride season kicks off in two weeks time with the Portsmouth Ride, so I'll compile some relevant info here. I typically get the tip-offs from this page but don't find its alphabetical order very helpful, so I am sorting everything in chronological order, as long as it can be reached from Oxford in a day trip using public transport (also including some rides abroad in places where I might be passing through by coincidence). No guarantee, obviously, do check other sources and local info.

As time passes and rides happen, I'll update the list with links to photos, press reports, and whatever I find about them.

25.5. Portsmouth
2.6. Oxford - the website the ride has been cancelled without explanation, unfortunately.
8.6. London - my photos, more in this Flickr group, see also this album by Dariusz.
9.6. Brighton
15.6. Cambridge; Brussels - photos here and here.
29.6. York
7.7. Bristol
13.7. Amsterdam
14.7. Cardiff
20.7. Portsmouth 2
27.7. Folkestone
3.8. Romford (East London)
24.8. Folkestone 2
25.8. Cardiff 2
September TBC Bristol 2

Own photo taken at last year's London WNBR.

My list of rides I participated in:

2015 Bristol
2016 Bristol, London
2017 Bristol, Brighton
2018 London
2019 London
2023 Oxford, London (hey that's me)
2024 London (I'm here and here and here - look for the green flag)

Links lead to the specific Flickr albums. All albums are combined in this Flickr collection.

rivers restored

Today's issue of Current Biology is a special theme issue on ecosystem restoration with lots of articles on various kinds of ecosystems from rescued coral reefs to land rehabilitated after mining, and general aspects from ecology to finance. My modest contribution is a feature about restoration of rivers, from the reinvention of what was once Europe's dirtiest river (not all that far from where I went to school, so this revolutionary change still boggles my mind) to the removal of barriers in Europe and North America:

Rivers revival

Current Biology Volume 34, Issue 9, 6 May 2024, Pages R360-R362

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 .

The river Emscher, which served as an open sewer for the entire 20th century, has been cleaned up in a 30-year restoration project. (Photo: Eselsmann™, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0 Deed).)

a bit of a neck problem

Pirate luthier adventures continued ...

I've had several neglected/abandoned violins coming in recently that were kindly donated by fellow freegle users. This one, number 10 in my logbook, is the first that actually has a serious problem that may be a bit of a challenge, namely a detached neck. Not only that it has come off, but there is a whole crime scene around it with traces of six interventions attempting to reattach the neck dating to at least four different times. Obviously, all of them appear to have failed. Some have involved serious woodworking skills so I am beginning to wonder if there is any special problem with this neck that makes it impossible to attach it?

Let me take you through the whole story - first the crime scene - a 3/4 violin possibly dating from the 1920s according to a labewl attached to the case:

Then, what I think must have been the first intervention is the replacement of the block on the inside of the violin body to which the neck should be attached (but isn't). Somebody cut a little window in the back of the violin to do this replacement and closed it very nicely afterwards. Alternatively, if the neck was broken violently (as opposed to coming loose because the glue failed) it may have damaged the back of the instrument in this area and it may have needed replacing anyways. Actually my current favourite violin, the one I usually play in folk sessions these days, has the same kind of repair and it appears to have worked in that case without any further measures.

But in this case it didn't work and somebody started drilling holes through the heel of the neck and into the block to insert dowels and stabilise the connection. As the corresponding holes show up in the block, I conclude this happened after the block replacement. Obviously, the first dowel may have been part of the same repair that gave us the new block, or it could have been later. Closer inspection reveals that three dowels were inserted at different times (apologies for the blurred photo my camera refused to focus on this correctly):

The one bottom left came first. Then, after this obviously failed, a new hole was drilled partially through the first dowel, and a second one inserted (top), partially overlapping with the circle of the first. Still no luck. Then our repairer drilled a bigger hole and used a bigger dowel (right) intersecting both previous attempts. Two additional small dowels are found on both flanks of the neck closer to the fingerboard. I guess these could have been just reinforcements to any of the attempts above, so I haven't counted them as a separate repair attempt.

The fourth attempt in my counting only involved glue, as the holes left by the dowels are all filled with glue, so there was definitely an attempt relying on large amounts of glue after the repairs that involved the five dowels discussed.

So, well, all of the above failed, and I am left to wonder why. And what to do better. Will try optimising the fit and using the proper hide glue first, but any suggestions welcome.

Navigation aids for 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). 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. Currently it is sporting a brand new tailgut which I made from an old cello C string.

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 5) (donated by a friendly freegler) is my new favourite and the one I currently play in folk sessions.

violin 7) is a skylark from 1991 which I bought on gumtree for £ 10 and fitted with a better bridge. Good enough for folk I would say.

violin 10) is the broken one discussed above