Fri, 25 Sep 2026 17:45:13 -0400WeeblyFri, 10 Apr 2026 16:39:50 GMThttps://www.stamellstring.com/how-do-we-feel-about-great-violins/how-do-we-feel-about-great-violinsMarvin Bram contributed an essay to Stamell Stringed Instruments in the 1990s.  We’re pleased to share it again here:

How Do We Feel About Great Violins?
by Marvin Bram
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Sometimes two realms seem too different from each another to be connected in any important way. Einstein was amazed that one intellectual activity, practiced by only a few people, with that activity’s entirely human history of personal vagaries and accidents, could yield verifiable descriptions of the universe. (A mark of how blasé most of are in that Einstein was amazed, not most of us.) The difference between Newton or Einstein on the one hand and the starry universe on the other is one of scale; what joins the two is mathematics.

Very simple mathematics also joins the abstract realm of small whole numbers and the concrete enjoyment of music. More than two thousand years ago the Pythagoreans in Italy showed that two string-lengths in that the ratio of two to one will, when plucked, give the octave. Three to two, the fifth. What is remarkable about these physical facts is that they correspond to psychological states, great and less pleasure at perfect and less perfect consonance. Continuing the whole-number ratios carries the listener to dissonance. These two realms, the physical and the psychological, might also be regarded as exterior and interior: entirely exterior events, plucking two strings, produce private interior events, feelings of pleasure or displeasure.

Something like the mind/universe and interior/exterior dichotomies applies to violins. Here is a wooden box with holes in it lying under four strings. When the box is made in a certain way and then just competently bowed – the question of actual playing, of interpretation et al, is a separate one and posterior to our question – an intensity of pleasure that many of us value uniquely highly results. What is it about this object, an object after all, that elicits – why bands words – love, a feeling usually and correctly reserved for human beings?

A particular quality of violin tone.

Yehudi Menuhin, the story goes, would kiss his Strad goodnight. He loved that wooden box, I think, because nothing and no one sounded like it. Some violins produce a special constellation of high frequencies that envelops each note the violin produces. That constellation has a physical and psychological effect on both the player and the listener, an effect something like frisson that no other sound in the world can produce. We don’t know how great makers introduce such a constellation of frequencies – how they select and carve and graduate and seal and varnish wood, all craft activities in a workshop, so that many thousands of us might experience love. Seemingly incommensurable realms somehow made commensurable.

The author is professor emeritus of history at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York.


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