by Grit Laskin C.M., R.C.A.
By profession I am a Luthier, a maker of stringed musical instruments. Specifically, I make acoustic guitars and have been doing that full time since 1971. I also started a record company (Borealis Records) and co-ran it (for me: extracurricularly) for 25 years. I also created national Folk Music Awards in Canada (CFMA); have been performing music sine age14; have released 4 solo albums and another half dozen with various groups.
I mention all of the above solely so you understand my deep connection to various aspects of the music community.
Depending on the musical genre or the particular instrument family, the music scene is riddled with mysteries of many kinds. Where do the composition ideas emerge from? How does one player become exceptional on an instrument and another only mediocre? There are still undiscovered manuscripts by historic classical composers, routinely being searched for. And, of course, who was magically given the gift of the Blues at “The Crossroads”?
There is one particular mystery that continues to defy all attempts to solve it: Why were Stradivari violins so much better than all others being built in his era? Guarneri, Amati, Stainer, among others, made superb violins. And yet…Stradivari’s were superior.
Let me jump in with a sidebar… Making wooden musical instruments is at once craft, art, and science. Given the variety of materials used, plus the grain and stiffness variations from one piece of wood to the next, not to mention all the other variables of overall dimensions, thicknesses, the scale length, the finish (what kind of substance? how thick?), one relies largely on experience to make wise construction decisions. And our task is simply to make a wooden box that produces musical sounds, not just noise. When successful, the instrument, made from pieces of trees, can now affect human emotions.
One anecdote that confirms the ‘art’ side of the equation, is this: Strad was assisted by an uncle and a nephew, for some portion of his working life (he lived to be 93, and was building violins right up to the end). The uncle and nephew went on to build violins after Strad died. Yet, despite the fact that they worked right beside Strad, watched everything he did and followed his every instruction, their instruments were never quite as good! Clearly Strad’s unconscious mind was sifting data as he worked, and that information affected every decision he made along the way. Obviously some of that unconscious data remined buried, was never available to be conveyed, so it died along with Strad. Leaving us with no concrete answers as to why his instruments were superior.
For centuries scientists and researchers have struggled to reveal Strad’s “secret’. Every possible aspect of his instruments have been analyzed and inspected and test instruments built with what was being learned. Is it the finish? The position of the f-holes? The shaping of the top and back ‘plates’? How he prepared the wood before use? To this day there are only guesses, no definitive answer.
One other anomaly with Stradivari is the fact that he also made some other instruments. He made a mandolin, a harp, and 5 guitars.
Those guitars, naturally, made me curious. Why did he make them? Was it simply him agreeing to a commission because he had bills to pay? This was on my mind when I came up with a plot idea for a novel about Strad and his guitars. What if, I wondered, Strad really did have a proprietary formula. And, what if someone close to him felt it was important to secret it away, somewhere that none of his contemporary competitors could potentially discover it? That was the thought that sparked my novel The Stradivari Formula.
Ultimately the novel hinges on the invented fact that there was indeed a special ‘formula’. Two Cambridge students, working on their joint dissertation, stumble on a single oblique reference to something being hidden, found in the Italian postscript of a letter Strad’s uncle sent to his niece, and which they stumbled across while researching in Cremona. As the decades pass, the two students, neither of whom had ever given up searching for Strad’s secret, have a falling out, which lasts into adulthood. Ultimately one of them is someone who will lose everything in their life if the secret is found and revealed; the other feels duty bound to reveal the secret to the public—if the secret is uncovered. And therein lies one of the primary conflicts of the story.
I will also mention that I was obligated to devise a plausible formula, and I feel I did. It is based on woodworking techniques of Strad’s era blended with the volcanic chemistry of the region. I may have invented it but I made certain it was rooted in real substances and could potentially be attempted in real life—or at least it feels like it could.
Having explained all the above I must admit that the effect of music on the human brain and heart and soul will always be mysterious to me—wonderfully so. And I have no wish to understand the mechanics of how it achieves that. I’d rather just feel the music, be moved by it, without needing to understand the mechanism. In short, retain the mystery!
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