violin story

Okay, I finally figured out how to get the picture, but it's sideways. Oh well. I'll perfect that later.
Anyway, as I said, the first thing I would blog about would be my violin, as it is very important to me. I've played the violin for the better part of my life, and I'm in three different orchestras.

If you are a musician, you know that a lot of what you can do with your music depends solely on the quality of your instrument. Before I got the new violin, I was playing a student violin that was great to start out on, but could only take me so far. I had been talking to some people in my family, and they said that my maternal great-grandmother had played the violin. She had promised her violin to the first member of the family who could learn how to play it. One of my aunts tried, but never really learned.
Eventually, everyone forgot about the violin.
You should know that a high-quality violin, which is usually old and handmade, can cost anywhere from $5,000 up to hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the luthier and the condition of the instrument.
I had begun to "outgrow" the limits of my student violin, and my parents were dreading having to buy another. My mom later asked her mother if there was any way to find the violin that had belonged to my great-grandmother. My grandfather sent out an email to all of the family (they're wide-spread throughout the country) asking if any of them had the violin.
He never got a reply.
Mom told me this, and I was very upset that it couldn't be found - it had to be out there somewhere.
A while later, everything started to be kept secret from me. One of the family members had gone up into the attic one day - and there it was. In a crumbling case, with the strings, bridge, and tailpeice removed, and in desperate need of an oiling.
They sent the violin to my grandparents, who took it to a friend of theirs who is a luthier. He fixed it up so that it could be played. It had, amazingly, suffered very little damage during its life in the attic.
As a surprise, my grandparents gave it to me for my birthday. I polished it and changed the strings, bought a new case for it, and researched its origins.
My violin was made by an apprentice of a man named Giovan Paolo Maggini, an Italian luthier, hundreds of years ago. We've estimated that it was made in the 1800s, and was then considered a cheap model of the original Maggini. It was made in Italy and brought to the United States probably around the beginning of the 20th century, or the late 19th century.

The tag on the inside says as follows:
Giovan Paolo Maggini
Brescia - 1636

This basically meant that it was modeled after a 1636 Maggini violin. By looking at it, you can tell just that. It has an extra twist in the scroll, double purfling, and elaborate wood-grain. It wasn't made by Maggini himself, but I researched it and found that foreign luthiers in the 19th and 20th centuries often put the name and origin of the luthier whose violin they had modeled. The only way that you can tell a difference between the original Maggini violins and the later models, are that the originals were often decorated with elaborate gold inlay, which mine is not.
The other way that I can tell the difference is that, in one of the winds of the scroll, there are some very tiny initials engraved. You can't really tell what they say, but they form a kind of a logo, which was probably the luthier's way of claiming it, even though he had tributed it to Maggini.


Next post: my most recent travels