Click the video > below to see the poignant story of Bobbie's violin. For me personally the story of Bobbie dying in an RAF bomber in 1938 as the UK was rushing these planes into production to be ready for a war in Europe after Hitler annexed areas of the Czechoslovakia in that year resonated profoundly with Putin invading and annexing Ukrainian sovereign territory in Europe today. My daughter Eleena Sutton (who is 13) is - as of her performance yesterday - now the owner and custodian of "Bobbie's Violin". If it can be borrowed and played in the future by others to raise donations for Ukraine and the millions of invasion-displaced adults and children of Ukraine that would be a good thing. Maybe the BBC could have it played accordingly at the Proms? I am not sure, however, if the story of Bobbie's violin catches the imagination of others as it does me and his family - who have kept in touch after I won the instrument in an eBay auction earlier this year....
Eleena Sutton (Grade 6 ABRSM student) playing the University of Southampton 1931 violin in 2024 The Douglas Clitheroe (1931) University of Southampton violin is now restored and re-voiced. Initially, I thought the high arch of the violin table and corresponding steep angle of the fingerboard, which necessitated an unusually high bridge, required me to engage in the removal of a lot of wood from the new bridge that I cut from a blank and necessitated making it with enlarged kidneys and heart. My thinking was that the amount of wood in the bridge, pre-bridge surgery, would severely mute the sound of the violin. Knowing how much bridge wood to remove, where to remove it and when to stop removing it is a counter intuitive and also intuitively informed art informed by scientific trial and error experience. This work is done incrementally on the instrument using tiny wood files. The original bridge that came with the violin was tall also and had been thinned to a greater degree than st...
This is one on my free of charge repair list for Nottingham Music Hub today. The patient is an instrument owned by a pupil. They dropped it and the table (face) cracked from the saddle right up to the f-hole. It is a 14 inch viola, which means it is the same length as a full size( 4/4) violin. This size of viola is most usually a children's size. That said,a 14 inch viola is also commonly employed for violinists learning to play viola. The sound post was clearly extremely badly fitted - at an angle and not at all in the right location on the treble side of the bridge foot. Badly fitted sound post. Not perfectly vertical. The cross on the image below shows where the sound post was located. The a large dot where it should be located. Sound post badly located. Too far in. Moreover, when examined the "sound post" looks like it was some bit of left over scrap wood stick picked up off the ground with no regard to the fact a squirrel, mouse or chinchilla had been ...
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