The University of Southampton Violin

 






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 standard thinning in order not to mute the instrument.

I made and tuned a new bridge with a high arch and very wide heart and kidneys and tried several different newly cut soundposts.

In the end, because the D-string remained woolly and muted with the new bridge I made, I went back to the original bridge which I was surprised to learn worked better than before now that is was sitting atop a new soundpost. I then made it better still by increasing the arch a little under that bridge and opening the heart and kidney holes more than the original but less than my first attempt on a new bridge.

I think the violin sounds really rather nice now it's alive and singing again.

The famous Strad Magazine published an article on Southampton University teaching the making pf violins back in 1928, just three years before this violin was made there.






I think the University of Southampton should have this violin and have it played for students and staff on special occasions.





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