Rules, Rules, Rules... (con't)
Interviewee: Geoffrey Ovington

Violins have a very deceiving appearance (which is of course formed by rules), they appear to have been intricately bent into their arched shape. This is completely incorrect because violins are not bent, they are carved to their shape.  The only exception to this is the sides, “The sides are bent, but they’re only bent in one direction,” he tells me, “they’re not a compound bend. There’s no dome shape like you get when you carve.” The same is true with the scroll, it’s shape is achieved from a solid block of wood. 

The reason for all the curves in a violin is one of those simple things you just never get around to thinking of. It’s a rule of course, because in the world of instrument-making, designs are strict. “These Italian guys were absolute geniuses!” states Ovington, all the while discreetly searching for a piece of paper. “If you take a little piece of paper like this,” he says while cutting a strip from the wrinkled sheet of copy paper he had discovered on his desk, “it has no strength at all,” he continued, “it couldn’t resist anything.” He proved this for me by gently mashing the paper beneath weight of his hand. I nodded for him to complete the demonstration, “but as soon as you put a curve in it, it stands a chance,” he proceeded to bend the paper into an arc, lay it on its side, and it managed to support his hand this time.

This fact converts directly to the construction of a violin, something Ovington showed me using a piece of wood meant for the side of a violin. The wood was flimsy, very pliant, and to be perfectly honest, I can’t say it had much over the crinkled piece of copy paper, which had returned to it’s spot on the aged wooden desk. So how can this instrument support the hundred or so pounds of pressure exerted onto it? “That arc gives it tremendous resistance, and it becomes strong enough to work and last hundreds of years,” Ovington told me. Sure enough, that flimsy piece of wood now appeared to have the strength necessary to keep the back and front where they all belong. 

Slowly returning to his original point, he reminded me that the top and a bottom of an instrument couldn’t be bent like the sides. See, the sides are glued and molded to their position, but the top and bottom, with their dome shape, have no support, their arc is “floating” as Ovington puts it. “So if they were bent, they would eventually ‘unbend’, because nothing is holding them in place.” So they’re carved and that is the rule he proceeded to show me, “We make them thin, but the arch provides strength.”

The Italians used observations taken from the Greeks and Romans, if you put an arch in something, it becomes stronger. “When you look at pictures of old buildings,” Ovington explains, “you see tons of arches, it was just a real simple way to have tremendous strength and still keep an open space underneath it.” Most people can picture what he is describing, a ancient arch holding tons of stone, but  just as secure as if the wall was solid, and you can walk underneath. This is the principle that the violin, and other members of it’s instrumental family, run by.

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