Please visit the Don Rickert Musician Shop.
Recently I had been looking at a lot of violin and fiddle related websites and blogs and have seen far too many assertions that the violin was perfected centuries ago. This ranks up there on the idiocy scale as the statement by the Director of the U.S. Patent Office early in the 20th Century that the Office was no longer needed, because everything worth inventing had already been invented.
The violin was not perfected three hundred or even 400 years ago (I prefer the Magginis of the early 1600s myself). What was perfected was a basic design pattern for a particular type of violin adopted for particular types of music. Heck, even Thomas Jefferson, who was in debt up to his ears, but managed to get an Amati and one of the first Tourte bows (which were considered as outrageous as IncrediBows when first introduced) did not dare take his Amati to the local pub for a fiddling jam session. He took a Dancing Master's Pochette, for which he had a leather saddle case made. The best pochette in the world would not have compared to an Amati, Strad or Guarnerius, but it was absolute perfection for Tom J's immediate problem, getting to a pub and back home on horseback, with a lot of drinking and playing in between.
That's all for the moment...back to the shop to get ready for our next effort at divergence from stupid perfection. Probably something old Antonio Stradivari did a number of times. By all accounts, he was just as irreverent about stupid traditions as the irreverence embodied in these words.
More to come I am sure. Let the comments fly, but keep it clean, as I have the "Block User" button and I'm not afraid to use it :-)
DR
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