From Wikipedia: A Stradivarius is a stringed instrument built by members of the Stradivari family, particularly Antonio Stradivari. According to their reputation, the quality of their sound has defied attempts to explain or reproduce, though this belief is controversial.
So it is not surprising then that when somebody claims “global warming is to blame” they’ll get called on it as this reporter in the Vanouver base Province newspaper has done. h/t to reader Antonio Sans – Anthony
Musical prof a mouthpiece for eco-propaganda
She should know the jury’s still out on climate change
By Jon Ferry, The Province B.C. Canada
What set my teeth on edge last week was not the chilly weather, though Wednesday was the coldest March 11 on record. It was a University of B.C. professor’s claim that global warming is largely responsible for the fact folks can no longer make the heavenly-sounding violins they used to hundreds of years ago.
Not that I should be surprised: Global warming gets fingered for virtually everything these days, especially at our eco-infatuated universities. For these grant-hungry institutions, the fashionable notion that humans are mainly to blame for warming the planet is a godsend. It opens up so many fields of study where taxpayer funding can be justified on the grounds of saving Mother Earth and everything on it, including fabulous old fiddles, from climactic Armageddon.
Eugenia Choi, the UBC professor, clearly knows a thing or two about violins, including the 300-year-old Stradivarius she plays. She’s a concert violinist with impressive global credentials. And I wouldn’t dream of questioning either the moral duty she says she feels to protect these fine, handmade instruments or her interest in global warming. As reported in the university’s official news publication, Choi recently travelled to the Arctic with scientists and [U.S. president] Barack Obama team members, and “saw first-hand the plight of polar bears.”
No, where I take issue with the nimble-fingered professor is over her contention, as detailed in UBC Reports, that the reason a violin like a Stradivarius can now cost more than a house is largely because “global warming has changed how trees grow.”
How so? Choi explains: “You can no longer create new violins of the same quality. There just aren’t the same types of wood or density.”
And there’s a chance she’s right. Certainly, in 2003, a New York climatologist and a Tennessee tree-ring dating expert claimed that a mini ice age in Europe at the time master instrument-maker Antonio Stradivari was producing violins may have affected the density of the wood he was using — and hence enhanced the instruments’ tone quality. It was a theory supported last year by Dutch researchers. But it was far from conclusive.
Earlier this year, Texas researchers had a different theory, namely that the violins from the golden age of Italian instrument-making in the late 17th and early 18th centuries owed their celestial sound to chemicals in the wood preservatives. And other theories over the years have focused on everything from the fiddles’ glues and varnish to their unique shape. But as a Wikipedia entry on the subject concludes: “There remains no consensus on the single most probable factor.”
My point here is that the scientific debate over the violins made in Cremona, Italy, during a 70-year period of global cooling is far from over. It’s as unsettled as that over climate change today.
Our universities should be keeping an open and inquiring mind about both — at least if they’re interested in higher learning, as they claim to be.
Instead, they simply seem intent on cheerleading for the green team, pushing eco-propaganda. And that shortchanges us all.
Didn’t you notice that in good old days computers didn’t have coolers over processors? It was certainly colder then.
Jason (09:07:26) :
Despite many attempts, no empirical process is able to distinguish the music of a Stradivarius from other violins of the highest quality (both modern and ancient).
It should hardly be surprising that somebody who devotes so much time and energy to a fundamentally unverifiable phenomenon, would also draw a link to global warming.
Now that’s deep.
I go to one of those eco-propaganda pushing BC universities and my education is definitely affected by it.
I met a violin maker, forget his name, he gravitated to Ampleforth Yorkshire when I lost contact. He could make violins as good as Strads because he’d figured out what was significant. I think the exact dimensions of the interior sound space was the most important factor. He understood the importance of esoteric maths – the harmonies of fine geometrical proportions – that as C E Smith has mentioned, are not being taught. Yet they are of fundamental importance not only to violins’ sounds, but also to the creation of beauty. The Parthenon is replete with them. And as the utterly incredible Little Book of Coincidences shows, these mathematical harmonies lie deep, deep in the finely tuned maths of the planetary orbits in our solar system.
Ah, the pesky barycentre again.
Anthony, that book would blow your mind… and everyone here too.
I wonder what triggered the author’s imagination:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/01/0107_040107_violin.html
Some background: Henri Grissino-Mayer is the Tennessee tree-ring dating expert mentioned. From one of the numerous online articles after he did his examination of the “Messiah violin”:
Grissino-Mayer is a renowned dendrochronologist. It’s curious to me that his chronology “proves” not only the existence of the Maunder, but its “unprecedented” coldness. I don’t want to argue too much with him on this point.
As for whether a Strad delivers a warmer sound, I’d like to hear an objective judge… I figured I was getting a nice “warm” sound on my saxophone as long as the reed wasn’t split, and I wasn’t squeaking too badly.
Once upon a time… I was a high school student and there was some famous violinist giving a concert in a nearby large city. It was sold out at some outrageous price like $25 / seat minimum (this was when gasoline was 25 cents a gallon and bread was about 35 cents a loaf and cars were about $2k so figure that would be about $250 / seat in todays rubber ruler money). Sadly, I don’t remember his name. All I can say is he was top world class and he played a Stradivarius.
Somehow our local dirt poor rural school was blessed with a free performance by him. While it was in the gym, he arranged the audience, and positioned himself, such that the acoustics worked fairly well (as commented upon by my physics teacher, Mr. McGuire, who was seated near me. Mr. McGuire was impressed at the clear understanding of acoustics displayed.)
To say the performance was impressive would be a great understatement. I have never heard anything like it, before or since. At one moment during a “sad” phase of the music I was astounded to see a few tears sneaking from the eyes of Mr. McGuire who was completely captivated by the music. Here was a normally very gruff Lt. Colonel lost to the emotion of the music.
During a break between sets, the performer took a moment to talk about the violin. He stated that the secret to the Stradivarius was the varnish. That under no circumstances should they ever be stripped and refinished, since any that had been refinished were never the same quality. At most, a very thin touch up coat, no more. They would be fine violins, but no longer sound like a Stradivarius, if the original varnish were totally lost.
Now I don’t know his source for information, but I have to believe that if someone has a passion for violins and owns a Stradivarius, they will likely know how to keep it in good working order. We also have folks from the same time period, making violins from the same age wood, that are good, but not a Stradivarius. The trees / wood density theory does add some sound quality (that era does make better violins) but is not enough on its own. (And one can always just go up slope to get colder trees…). No, the cold is not enough to explain.
So my conclusions is that fine old trees (already a rare category with much old growth forest cut down – not global warming induced…) from a cold era or from a colder part of the mountain will give better wood. There is evidence that these trees were floated down to where they were used and left soaking in salt water for days, months or maybe even years and that his may have also enhanced the wood (so an investigation of salt soaking effects is worth it). Then you take this fine sounding wood and give it to a master craftsman and you get the fine violins made by many of the makers of that era and that area of Italy. But what makes the fine into the exquisite?
On possibility is that the wood was treated with preservatives, perhaps even preservatives with “crush gems” in them. See:
http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0004245
where they find evidence for this. Gems were thought to be imbued with various near magical powers in that time. Perhaps in the case of preserving music wood, they were…
One potential issue is not pleasant to contemplate. It may be that the best violins need to age 100 years to reach their peak. Being played by fine hands causing the best vibrations to flex the wood in the best ways. Soaking up skin oils and minerals from the skin. If that has merit, we will know in 100 years who is making the best violins today. Since there is little we can do with this point, we will set it aside (I suppose taking some good (but not heirloom!) violins and trying: baking, oxidation, humidity cycling, etc. aging experiments. That might be interesting as research. But not helpful right now…)
So the most likely place left to look for a way to explain the Stradivarius is the varnish. We can see the structure and workmanship and similar quality in other violins with similar wood… but different varnish. So what’s in that varnish? Crush gems has been given as an explanation. This hardens the varnish and that does change the tone somewhat.
The organic portion looks typical enough:
http://www.separationsnow.com/coi/cda/detail.cda?id=15241&type=Feature&chId=3&page=1
But is there more? And might it interact with that seasoned waterlogged wood? Might it be that you need a wood of fine grain, cut green and soaked in fresh, then salt water, as it ages and the pores open due to various fermentations, such that a particularly mineral rich stiff varnish can enter the wood? I think so. So does this fellow:
http://www.nagyvaryviolins.com/the_chemistry_of_a_stradivarius.pdf
I saw a TV show on instruments on one of the “educational” channels. One of the folks they interviewed was a current violin maker using varnishes with crush precious stones in it (such as rubies and emeralds) who was heralded as being a maker of fine violins by the folks purchasing them. Unfortunately, while I’m interested in the chemistry of it, I don’t have the mechanical skills to make the instruments nor the musical skills to tell a good one from a great one (my hearing is basically zero above 8 kHz or so and not so good below that… when in High School I could hear 22 kHz burglar alarms. The world sounded much different then. So did the Stradivarius…)
But if anyone wants an assistant to participate in wood aging and mineral rich ancient varnish recreation, I’m interested in those “icky” parts of the process and not so much in the fine carving and playing parts… FWIW, I’d start with a 1 month fresh water soak, then a 3 month to 9 month soak in sea water at the temperatures common in Cremona (maybe with inoculation with selected representative microbes) followed by a dunk in a traditional preservative mineral bath and by a gentle air drying. This wood, when carved, ought to take a varnish well. I would use a two layer system with a thinner alcohol varnish first with fine mineral particles. The top coat would be thicker with fine ground amber particles along with garnet, ruby, etc. powder (no more than 40% liquids and I’d try to get it down to 30%)
Long, slow, hard, and expensive process; but I’d bet hard money the result would be a fine instrument…
Violins do need to age to achieve a superior sound but they also have to be built well to start with. Using modern tuning techniques a very very good violin can be built today and artificially aged to get the 40 or so years of aging required in a few months but they still cost a lot of money, 10s of thousands of dollars. I think all the Strads and other similar era violins have been rebuilt over the years to add modern necks which increase the sound volume of the instruments and make them more suitable for soloists. You also need to consider of all the violins made it is mostly the good ones that have survived the centuries.
From the sublime (inter alia, the wonderful posts on violin memorabilia by the Smiths, George E. and E. M.), to the truly ridiculous, but unfortunate:
Notice from an e-list in our town (Framingham, MA; local links removed):
Now what is “The Climate Project”? Read this:
“All personally trained by Al Gore to educate the public about climate change.”
Is the battle already lost? The Alarmists are busy indoctrinating the young. What are the Realists doing?
/Mr Lynn
True story though a bit OT…
I worked at a music school and would occasionally drop by a neighborhood bar after work. Most of them there knew me and what I did, and this one time the bartender greeted me and asked me ” how is business?”.
I answered “I broke my G-String today” and a stranger at the bar spit out his drink and swung around on his stool to stare.
We all had a good laugh. But it was true. I played viola and the string had popped in the middle of a rehearsal earlier that day.
What are the Realists doing?
I can’t speak for other realists. I work in the oil business – so I am an evil villain not even worthy of existence compared the saintly Ms. Choi.
I lost a coworker when his head was cut off by radical fundamentalists. I also jumped from a burning offshore rig in West Africa that went down in a huge fire (five contractors died). I got Malaria three times. I narrowly missed death again when a piece of pipe narrowly missed impaling me, having fallen 100 feet. I have also been threatened at gun point.
It ain’t easy to bring home the bacon (sorry that should read “exploit other people” according to the liberals) so that the likes of Ms. Choi can live their pampered lives in cosy academia and grow up (trained from the age of 3) to be a virtuoso.
The next generation has been brainwashed to hate Big Oil – no matter all the fertilizer that produces our food, all the plastics, all the heating and all the transportation fuel which provides the entire basis for their comfort and lifestyle…
That is what the realists are doing…they work damn hard so that others can spend their lives doing government funded research or devote their lives to learning to play beautiful music or attending political rallies to save the world.
And we are hated for what we do but the last I checked it was folks like us that are making the real differences to living standards and quality of life…
bill p:
“Grissino-Mayer is a renowned dendrochronologist. It’s curious to me that his chronology “proves” not only the existence of the Maunder, but its “unprecedented” coldness. I don’t want to argue too much with him on this point.”
Well, I’ll call Grissino-Mayer on this point. The tree-ring realities are full of surprises, many of which have been elucidated at Climate-Audit. For example, the relationship between growth rate and temperature is an upside down “U” shaped quadratic (maximum growth at an optimum temperature. Another one which has not been explained there yet (AFAIK) is that density of softwoods ALSO shows a U-shaped function; after a certain point, narrower growth rings no longer mean higher density. Grissino must not know as much as he thinks he does, LOL.
Get serious people. This is a crock and you all know it. Even you loonies that practice the religion of Global Warming. If you were serious, some guy would be making violins in an igloo in the artic while he watches the growing population of Polar Bears drown.
OOps, bill p:
I re-read your post, and I made some hasty, rash judgements. I think my facts are correct, but the very things I mentioned could possibly explain a unique nature of the wood in the Strat. violins. They could have a very unique density due to that extremely slow growth rate. Not necessarily a higher density, but a unique one. Very intriguing. Adds to the speculation, maybe. Sorry for blurting out like that.
And that is a great answer! Thanks for all that you do, and the risks that you take.
I thought to myself as I wrote the question (“What are the Realists doing?”) that the answers would probably be variations on “Working, dammit! Making the world go round, and digging for the data that will prove the Alarmists wrong.”
But it worries me that the Goracle is training legions of propagandists to proselytize and convert the young and naive. The President of the Czech Republic likens this ‘Green’ movement to the Stalinists who oppressed his country for decades. It isn’t just about climate, any more. It’s about control, and brainwashing the young is the first step.
/Mr Lynn
And it’s because of global warming that nobody knows how to make authentic Damascus steel swords anymore…..
I read many years ago an article published in National Geographic (so it must be true?) that the sound characteristic of Stradivari violins were caused by tree logs being sent downriver from the forests, in a long journey. The time spent in the water diluted the calcium carbonate inside the wood fibers leaving hollow streaks that gave the violins their remarkable sound. The forests where the wood was taken was rich in calcium carbonate and was taken by the trees.
I have seen in Bolivia wood (Bolivian oak) whose calcium carbonate was washed out by a similar process. It is a very light wood (almost as balsa wood) and make very decorative wall paneling.
Another story that I find more plausible.
Has it never occurred to Eugenia Choi that it might be the violinists and not the violins that are responsible for the diminished quality of sound coming from new violins? Or that new violins have not had four hundred years to “break in” and achieve a sound that can only come from antiquity? That the sound of new violins is not necessarily inferior to old violins but merely different due to methods of construction and materials?
Appraising the sound of a violin is a very subjective endeavor. Martin guitars built in the 1930s have a similar attraction to collectors and musicians as do Stradivarius violins, but most everyone agrees that we are now in a golden age of guitar making in which certain luthiers are making guitars that sound better and are better built than ever before.
Is there no end to the problems or anomalies that can be attributed to global warming?
From Wikipedia:
“In a particularly famous test on a BBC Radio 3 program in 1977, the great violinists Isaac Stern and Pinchas Zukerman and the violin expert and dealer Charles Beare tried to distinguish among the “Chaconne” Stradivarius, a 1739 Guarneri del Gesú, an 1846 Vuillaume, and a 1976 British violin played behind a screen by a professional soloist. The two violinists were allowed to play all the instruments first. None of the listeners identified more than two of the four instruments; two of the listeners identified the 20th-century violin as the Stradivarius.”
oo weird, I was just thinking AGW was doing this. I just bought a new violin( a cheap one) and broke a string tuning it.. I’ve played guitar(38 years), for most of my life and rarely if EVER have broken a string tuning, so it’s a sure thing it’s catastrophic global warming making them sound bad.
Oh and I’ve never played, tuned, or picked up a violin before this one ..
So it has to be true …..CUZ I SOUND LIKE CRAP!
And that’s the story I’m sticking too! : P
Hehehe!
Seriously though she has it backwards, this next decade or so will be the BEST time to build a Violin,
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/120120947/abstract
“ABSTRACT
•
Violins produced by Antonio Stradivari during the late 17th and early 18th centuries are reputed to have superior tonal qualities. Dendrochronological studies show that Stradivari used Norway spruce that had grown mostly during the Maunder Minimum, a period of reduced solar activity when relatively low temperatures caused trees to lay down wood with narrow annual rings, resulting in a high modulus of elasticity and low density.”
There’s so many kinds of density’s of wood/sound change to different kinds of wood used for an instruments( guitars for me), it’s quite remarkable! 🙂
Here’s another view on the purported unrivaled excellence of the Stradivarius from a poster named Toby on another music-oriented website:
“Here’s a little off-topic story which is also on-topic. In the South Pacific we have men that sail between islands in their little boats without a single piece of navigational equipment. They sail for days and nights and arrive at their destinations without fail, which are tiny, isolated small islands and atolls surrounded by hundreds of miles of open sea. It is said that they can feel the currents in their testicles and steer according to clues so subtle as to be invisible to most mortals.
“We have become so used to our tools and technology that we have lost the keen senses that those who have to do without them have honed to a fine art. Stradivari was apprenticed to Amati: there was a whole tradition that he was steeped in from his early days, which he managed to take even further. Perhaps he could feel the correct wood with his testicles, and through his knowledge and sensitivity and experience knew exactly how to shape those plates. Perhaps he had his own special varnish, perfected through years of experimentation, as Michelangelo had his secret paint recipes (along with many master artists of that age).”
With apologies to Eugenia Choi, is it possible that the scientists who are cocksure (ahem) that global warming is going to roast us all to bloody hell are feeling it in their testicles?
Yes Lance. Agreed…. on the “remarkable” factor.
The Maunder Minimum produced some incredible minds (i.e. JS Bach and others).
Obviously, as cruel as Mother Nature can be….she causes organisms to work harder to survive and justify themselves as a species.
Not a bad thing given the current trend of humanity.
Let the cycles continue….
CHRIS
Norfolk, VA
Perhaps some basics about tree growth would aid in understanding. Trees grow in girth by adding a new layer of wood each year between the old wood and the bark (at the cambium). In effect, a conical sheathe of new wood is added each year (in temperate and boreal regions). In cross-section the sheathes are seen as annual rings (tropical trees grow all year and so do not have annual rings).
If volume growth was constant, the rings would diminish in width with distance from the pith because each successive sheathe covers a greater surface area. But volume growth is not constant. Tree growth (whether height, volume, or diameter) generally follows sigmoid (S-shaped) growth patterns. Growth rate (the 1st derivative) peaks at relatively young ages (20-50 years in long-lived species such as Douglas-fir).
Hence in an open grown tree (no competition) ring width naturally diminishes with age, especially after peak growth ages. Most trees are not open grown, however, and are subjected to competition from adjacent trees. Stand grown trees exhibit diminishing ring widths even earlier in their life spans.
Competition can change as trees in stands die (from various mortality factors) in a process called “stem exclusion.” Individual trees can be “released” from competition if the neighboring trees die. Individual tree can also be stressed by various factors and grow poorly for several seasons. Hence trees may exhibit narrowing and widening rings at different periods in their growth.
Those deviations from smoothly diminishing ring width may have (usually have) nothing to do with climate. Instead beetle attack, fungal attack, top breakage from ice or wind, soil development or degradation, and the fate of neighboring trees are more likely to affect ring growth in individual trees.
For those reasons climate proxy trees are carefully selected. Only trees that appear to have been open grown for their entire lives are chosen (perhaps 1 in a thousand). Of course, it is nearly impossible to tell what the competitive environment of an individual tree might have been hundreds of years ago. A great many assumptions accompany climate proxy tree selection. In addition, the natural diminishing of ring width that occurs with distance from the pith must also be dealt with, generally via theoretical mathematical models with little or no empirical validation. Validation is fraught with uncertainty because ring sequences in individual trees deviate (vary) significantly from smooth curves.
All of which makes tree rings very poor proxies for temperature. Dendrochronology is useful for detection of landscape fire events that leave a distinct scar on trees. Everything else inferred, such as extended droughts, extended rainy periods, and especially minute variations in average temperatures, are big stretches of the imagination. The deeper one gets into tree ring “science,” the more it looks like alchemy. Steve McIntire of Climate Audit has (soundly) questioned the statistics of tree ring proxies, but his expertise does not include forest biometrics. Mine does. Trust me; generalizations about climate effects on tree rings are giant leaps of (groundless) speculation.
Has anyone ever done a double blind listening test with modern and old violins?
Jeremy
Great post. Thank you for saying and doing it all.
From my end, it was finding stories that made Karen Silkwood look tame. For the sake of my daughter and family I didn’t want threatened, I kept silent. But now she hardly wants to know me, so I’m free; and as I grow older I’ve less to lose by speaking up. I want to go knowing I’ve done what I can to make this world a better place. Top of my wish list is finding the best means to enable the real truth to come out. Official Climate Science is in a ropy state but it’s not the only serious issue either. But it seems like ground where I can develop my strengths and find many of my real family – and have outrageous fun too.
I’m not going to crack singlehanded all the challenges of getting a skeptics wiki going, that can become the default point of reference. But I’m working on it, sure that it will come in time, because I’m sure we need it.