intertwined audiobook is out

I just discovered that my latest book, Intertwined is already available as an audiobook, from Tantor Media. Last I heard was that the audio rights were sold last summer.

Glad to hear from the sample clip they found a British narrator for this (Mike Cooper) and an actual human, just before AI gobbles up everything. Sounds good to me, even though I'm not sure I would want to have 12 hours worth of my own words read back at me.

Anyways, if you would like to listen to Intertwined, now you can!

There is also an ebook version as expensive as the hardback, but no news yet on a paperback.

a global meltdown

In case you didn't realise, 2025 is the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation and March 21 was the annual World Day for Glaciers. The frozen freshwater stocks of our planet urgently need all the awareness and support they can get. At 1.5 degrees warming and rising, they are disappearing fast and that will affect the water supplies of two billion people, contribute to sea level rise, and accelerate further warming through the loss of albedo.

So, plenty of reasons to care about glaciers, and high time to dedicate a feature to them, which I hadn't done before.

a world in meltdown

Current Biology Volume 35, Issue 6, 24 March 2025, Pages R199-R201

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. (I think threads only transfer if the first post was transferred, so once I start a new thread it should work.)

Last year's thread is here .

Glaciers around the world offer imposing, landscape-defining sights, but many are shrinking and doomed to disappear. The photo shows the Perito Moreno Glacier, Patagonia, Argentina. (Photo: pclvv/Flickr (CC BY 2.0).)

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.