By Roland Piquepaille
Nobody really knows why Stradivarius and other violins designed in the late 17th and early 18th centuries still sound so good compared to modern ones. Is it because of secret techniques, use of special wood or something else? Now, two researchers think the cold climate, a mini ice age which ruled over Europe during this period, is responsible for the quality of musical instrument making.Lloyd Burckle of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, Columbia University, and Henri Grissino-Mayer of the Laboratory of Tree Ring Science, University of Tennessee, propose that the superior sound quality of instruments from this era may be explained by the climatic regime that gripped Europe and perhaps much of the world from AD 1645 to 1715. Known as the Maunder Minimum, it was a period characterized by a scarcity of sunspots and a reduction in the Sun's overall activity.
The less intense solar radiation and activity coincided with a sharp decline in temperature during the Little Ice Age and a period of very cold weather in western Europe. The Maunder Minimum is clearly seen in tree-ring records from high-elevation forest stands in the European Alps. The long winters and cool summers of this 70-year period produced wood that has slow, even growth -- desirable properties for producing quality sounding boards.
Here are these "tree-rings" on an old wood violin (Credit: Mark Inglis).
Antonio Stradivari of Cremona, Italy, perhaps the most famous of violin makers, was born one year before the beginning of the Maunder Minimum. He and other violinmakers of the area used the only wood available to them -- from the trees that grew during the Maunder Minimum. Burckle and Grissino suggest that the narrow tree rings that identify the Maunder Minimum in Europe played a role in the enhanced sound quality of instruments produced by the violinmakers of this time. Narrow tree rings would not only strengthen the violin but would increase the wood's density.
The research paper has been published by the scientific journal Dendrochronologia. Here is a link to this paper, "Stradivari, violins, tree rings, and the Maunder Minimum: a hypothesis" (PDF format, 213 KB, 5 pages).
Now, because of the current global warming phenomenon, does this mean that musical instruments will have poorer and poorer qualities? The researchers don't go that far.
Source: Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, December 3, 2003; Dendrochronologia, Volume 21, 2003, Issue 1, Pages 41-45
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