Cal Meineke, the skeptical violinmaker: “I wanted knowledge that I could explain.”
 

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A SHORT HISTORY OF THE VIOLIN »
A brief lesson on the instrument’s beginnings

Forty-five years ago, as a freshman in college, Cal Meineke was poking around a music department storage room and came across a rare Tyrolean violin made in the 17th century by the German Matthias Albani.

Meineke had recently become serious about playing the violin. He drew a bow across the strings of the old instrument. Nothing in the violin’s appearance marked it as special, yet its sound was unlike anything Meineke had produced before. “It had a buttery quality,” he later said. “You never forget it if you hear it.” The experience lodged a question in his mind: Why is it that some instruments sound beautiful, while other, nearly identical instruments do not?

Meineke graduated in 1971 from the University of Illinois at Chicago with a chemistry degree and went on to graduate work and research in molecular biology. He finished medical school in less than three years and busied himself establishing a medical practice and raising a family in Oak Park. But the question persisted.

Meanwhile, Meineke skirted the fringes of Chicago’s classical music world. He played first violin in Oak Park’s community orchestra and got to know Michael Darnton, who worked on stringed instruments at Bein & Fushi, a dealer in downtown Chicago. Darnton occasionally let Meineke try an antique violin made by one of the legendary Italian masters, and the tonal difference between a great instrument and an ordinary one continually struck the doctor.

What accounted for that difference?

In his early 40s, his practice established and his kids getting older, Meineke indulged his curiosity and turned his scientific mind to the question. During nights and weekends in the fall of 1993—in a few weeks, with only a book to teach him and tools he’d been given by the violinmaker Günther Reuter—he built a violin. “It was a thrill,” he says, remembering that first one. “Just making an instrument that was playable, one that sounded kind of like a violin.” The next year, he made three more violins, two violas, and his first cello.

His approach conformed to the practice of a conservative craft: Match the measurements of a great instrument of the 17th or 18th century made by one of the masters of the Cremona school in northern Italy—Amati, say, or Stradivari (see “A Short History of the Violin”). Follow its precise dimensions and arching diagrams and rely on improving skill to come ever closer to making an exact copy. But despite his improving skill, Meineke’s third, fourth, and fifth instruments sounded no better than his first, and some sounded worse than others.

Trying to figure out why, Meineke looked more deeply into the history of the instrument. He read all he could find on the subject, including articles about the “mystery” of the Stradivarius, a perennial topic in violin literature. Generations of musicians had speculated about why few, if any, modern violins could compare with the several hundred surviving Cremona instruments, which sold for a million dollars and more. Was it some secret varnish? Did the hard Italian maple in the violin backs produce the incomparable power? Or was it something intuitive that had been passed down—and stayed—in the old Cremona guild?

It wasn’t long before Meineke came to view much of the accepted wisdom of violinmaking and violin quality as mythology. Trained as a scientist, he didn’t believe in mystique and wasn’t interested in intuition. “I wanted knowledge that I could explain,” he says.

Many of the Cremona instruments did sound exquisite to him, but not all of them did—and the Strads, especially, were notoriously finicky, difficult to play and keep in tune. Some newer instruments by little-known makers played effortlessly, Meineke thought, and to his ear sounded superior to old Italian violins 20 times more expensive. (Occasionally, over the decades, celebrated blind tests have embarrassed learned audiences and violinists who couldn’t pick out a Cremona instrument from its well-crafted modern counterparts.) There seemed to be a murky relationship between an instrument’s sound quality and its cost. With a strong financial incentive to push the pedigreed instruments, whose value as objets d’art was driven by collectors, dealers typically determined value based on three factors: the market, an instrument’s condition, and its provenance. The sound—in a tool created to make sound—had no bearing on value except at the highest end of the market. Meineke saw emperor’s clothes all around.

He understood the argument that sound quality is subjective, that a great player could produce a more pleasing sound on a cigar box than a poor player could on a fine violin—that beautiful music, like the appeal of any art, is a matter of aesthetics. But Meineke listened to lots of people play the same and different instruments, and he became suspicious that it wasn’t the playing that made his own creations sound unpleasant, nor any sense of aesthetics, but something inherent in the instruments themselves.

He believed there might be an empirical way to figure it out, some basis in the physics of the instrument. So he set out, as a scientist, to answer a question of art.

 

Photograph: Nathan Kirkman

 

“In a good instrument, you can hear the harmonics,” a long-time cellist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra counseled Meineke, who labored in his basement workshop, striving to craft violins that produced the perfect sound.
 

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A SHORT HISTORY OF THE VIOLIN »
A brief lesson on the instrument’s beginnings

Meineke didn’t find anything in the orthodox research of stringed-instrument acoustics that was of much use to him. Some of the pioneering work by the German scientist Hermann von Helmholtz in the 19th century and the later experiments of the Catgut Acoustical Society and its cofounder, the innovative East Coast violinmaker Carleen Hutchins, interested him and helped frame his early thinking. At least that’s what he says when he’s being generous. Other times, when he doesn’t hold back the strength of his opinions, he might say something like, “Hutchins did some interesting experiments, but she was wrong. Helmholtz himself would have told you he didn’t understand how instruments work. He lived in a Euclidean world, where the entire branch of physics was essentially solved. Violins have been refractory to the applications of science because the problems are profoundly abstract and layered and require, beyond insight, process skills that are not easily developed in our noisy, impatient world.”

The violinmakers Meineke knew didn’t take the time to think about physics, and almost all of the modern physics research he saw was theoretical. None gave him a practical blueprint for how to build a better instrument.

He was open to ideas—he paid $5,000 for a block of old Eastern European maple, experimented with varnish formulas—and became, over time, a competent violinmaker. But he wasn’t particularly interested in an instrument’s appearance. He was in it for the sound. He kept coming back to the basic understanding that had been articulated for him by the late Philip Blum, the longtime cellist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Blum had played the first cello Meineke made. He’d said, “In a good instrument, you can hear the harmonics. The sound is not damped. It rings with tones and overtones.” Meineke heard that “ring” as strings simultaneously producing both clear tones and echoes of those tones, as if the sound of several instruments were coming through each note. The strings of a well-tuned violin seemed to generate their tones instantaneously, with hardly any effort or pressure on the part of the player.

Holding his ear close to the early instruments he made, Meineke noticed that the pitch differed almost everywhere he listened. He wondered: If a violin’s pitch changes from one end of the instrument to the other or from its top plate to its back, could the sound be a composite of all those competing pitches? “It’s not subjective,” he says. “No matter your ear, an A is 440 cycles per second, and if you hear that along with a tone that’s 448 cycles per second, that’s going to be dissonance, and it’s not going to sound good.”

In a beautiful-sounding violin, Meineke realized, the strings excited the wood in such a way that the sound waves moved in unison and reinforced one another—resulting in harmonic undertones and overtones that gave power and color and texture to the notes. The thought led him to question the accepted notion that a string of a certain length and mass under a certain tension always gives a certain pitch. “I came to believe that might be true of an ideal string,” he says, “but it’s not true for a real string attached to a wooden box.”

Meineke discovered that even tiny changes in the thicknesses of the top and back plates radically changed the pitches he could hear. He developed a thin, pliable tool to reach through the narrow f-hole openings in the top plates and sand away minute amounts of wood from particular regions inside the instrument; he used a long-handled gouge to take heavier amounts from the back. After he’d scarred a few violins for life, he became adept at removing and regluing the tops to get at the insides more easily.

He started out tap-tuning the plates—planing or sanding the plates until tapping on them produced a clear tone along and across certain directions of the grain. But tapping didn’t mimic the moving strings’ effect on the wood. When he plucked a string quietly and put his ear to the back plate, he could hear the tone of the back, and if he plucked louder, he could hear the tones of the back and the top plates at the same time, usually in dissonance. “Bifid!” he’d say, a medical term meaning “cleft into two parts.” He theorized that changing the thickness in specific areas of the plates would bring the pitches together and create clear, powerful tones. He fashioned a crude tool that echoed the Victorian earphone. With his ear cupped to a paper cone glued to a thin wooden dowel, he could touch the dowel to precise points on the plates and hear the tones coming through them as he plucked a string.

And he started getting results. Not all of his instruments rang through the range of notes and across all the strings, but occasionally one did. Susan Ross, a member of the Illinois Philharmonic Orchestra, bought a Meineke instrument and started coming by his house to play on his latest experiments. Philip Blum, who normally played a 300-year-old Italian cello, took one of Meineke’s on tour with him and used it one summer at Ravinia. Teddy Rankin-Parker, an advanced student of Blum’s wife, Nancy, said that his “Cal cello” was so easy to play that he could progress as far in ten minutes on it as he had in three lessons on his previous instrument. In 1998, word of a particularly good cello made it from Nancy to her sister, Sue Ann Erb, who taught Suzuki-method violin in New Hampshire and whose daughter, Alissa, had been discouraged by a long search for a new cello. Alissa flew to Chicago and fell in love with Meineke’s.

Intrigued by what she heard, Sue Ann also visited the violin doctor, bringing along her 250-year-old Leidolff violin. She went downstairs into Meineke’s shop and played some Bach and Corelli on one of his instruments—and felt like a completely different player. “What I’d been struggling to play suddenly came easily,” she recalls. “I was astounded by how responsive and clear the instruments were.” For a teacher, the implications were deep.

Meineke made a violin for Erb and shipped it to New Hampshire, and she had the strange sensation of hearing the notes leap out an instant before she even bowed them. She gave the violin to one of her top students, Lexy Harrod, who took it to an appraiser named Ken Meyer. Meyer, who made adjustments on Yo-Yo Ma’s cello when Ma came to Boston, and who had served as a judge for the Violin Society of America, said he’d give the Meineke violin an F for varnish and fine finish work—but that it sounded amazing. He valued the instrument at $25,000, almost double what Meineke had charged for it.

By word of mouth, a small Meineke fan club was forming. More musicians dropped by his living room to try out his latest creations. (To date, Meineke has made more than 90 violins from scratch, as well as a number of violas and cellos.) Still, the doctor didn’t know how to replicate his intermittent successes and was reluctant about promoting his experiments to a wider audience. “When I know what I’m doing,” he told people, “then I’ll feel I can put the word out.”

* * *

 

Photograph: Julia Meineke

 

 

Related:

A SHORT HISTORY OF THE VIOLIN »
A brief lesson on the instrument’s beginnings

Not everyone was a fan. Some credentialed luthiers—the traditional term for people who make and repair stringed instruments—dismissively referred to Meineke as “that doctor.” Some high-toned dealers refused to say anything about him if asked. Meineke entered two of his instruments in competitions sponsored by the Violin Society of America, where their less-than-perfect appearance resulted in low marks. A few violinists from the Boston Symphony Orchestra took time out between concerts one year to play a couple of Meineke violins and gave mixed reviews. “Somehow I wish they had more heft, wish they resisted me more,” one said. “When I work harder for the sound, the instrument gives back more.” Some observers who listened to Meineke describe what he was hearing in a violin couldn’t hear what he heard. They wondered if Meineke might be dealing in emperor’s clothes of his own.

“I’m not a professional violinmaker,” he told people. “I’m an investigator. A professional respects the traditions of the profession and does what he’s taught to do. An investigator tears it all down, questions everything, asks, ‘What should we be doing?’ It’s a completely different posture.”

By freely taking apart instruments and reassembling them, and by aggressively regraduating the interiors of finished instruments, Meineke found himself cutting against the conservatism of the craft. He was forming a theory that would place him almost entirely outside of the field: A well-tuned instrument, he believed, had to be built in layers, like a boat being built up from the keel. He understood the violin to be a closed box that needed to function as a whole. But he theorized that if either of the two main parts of the box—the top or the back—wasn’t by itself in tune with the strings, no amount of adjusting could make the whole box sound clear. He wondered if it would be possible to isolate the various parts of the violin and hear their tones independently, without interference.

* * *

In 2001, he created a climate-controlled workshop in his basement. He often put in a full day at his medical practice or teaching internal medicine at Northwestern Memorial Hospital and then came home, had dinner with his family, and worked for five or six hours in his basement lab. When he came to the brink of figuring something out, he’d work maniacally through a weekend, 12 hours a day. He stopped going to movies, didn’t take vacations. He was no longer merely curious, but engaged by a narrow, extraordinarily complex quest, the kind that sometimes leads to major advances—or can look, from the outside, like delusion.

He designed two custom forms to isolate the components: one a fixed fingerboard that accepted a top plate underneath; the other a crosspiece that spanned an instrument’s back plate, supporting the bridge and strings without the presence of a top plate. Over hours of listening and training his ear, he found that the different woods (historically spruce for the top plate, maple for the back) inherently produced different pitches from the same string. Merely copying the thicknesses found in an earlier instrument would make beautiful sound only if the maker were using wood identical to the original. Unless you were using Stradivari’s wood, copying a Stradivarius wouldn’t get you there. To have any hope of consistently creating exquisite harmonics, Meineke was convinced that a maker had to tune each plate to the strings, then the plates together, then the instrument as a whole. The only way to do it, he now believed, was the way Stradivari probably did it: by listening as he was building and by knowing what he was listening for.

Meineke’s skills improved along with his growing understanding. His son, Greg, a skilled carver with a good ear, enrolled at the highly regarded Chicago School of Violin Making and brought some of his formal training back to his dad’s workshop. The results jumped again.

Meineke began demanding his earlier instruments back so he could bring them up to his rising standards. He insisted that Sue Ann Erb bring her violin to him as she passed through Midway Airport on a layover. He regraduated small sections of it—a fraction of a millimeter here, a couple of scrapes there—and handed it back to her on her return trip through Chicago. It got to be a routine between them. They’d talk on the phone and Meineke would say, “What notes don’t you like? Are there any parts of the strings that are too hard to play?” Erb might reply, “Maybe the B-flat in fifth position on the D string could be a little easier.” And Meineke would say, “When are you flying this way again? I’ll meet you at Southwest.”

He occasionally made violins in less than a week—ridiculously fast, rushing the finish work—but he couldn’t make them fast enough to keep pace with the experiments he wanted to try. In 2007, he began buying instruments from Germany and China so that he could accelerate his investigation. He bought the finished violins for a few hundred dollars apiece, took them apart, worked his science, and then resold them to students for a thousand dollars, reluctantly, to finance his habit. He stockpiled violins—a couple dozen lined the shelves in a basement storage room—and experimented like mad. Some weekends he worked on five or six instruments. He spent hours alone in the cluttered shop, his silver hair uncombed, barefoot on the cement floor, wearing a T-shirt and shorts even in winter, unaware for a whole day that his shirt was inside out, oblivious to distractions. An out-of-date calendar displaying glossy photos of old Italian violins hung on a wall above his spindle sander (“My pinup,” Meineke called it). A clock above his bench stayed on daylight-saving time year-round. He might grab a cup of coffee and a peanut butter cookie for lunch at 3 p.m., or he might not remember to have lunch at all. He plucked and listened, sanded and scraped, plucked and listened, his ear to the instrument, his ear to the paper cup, moving the dowel an inch, half an inch, and plucking again, listening as if he were using a stethoscope, hearing a heartbeat.

When he was close—maybe there—he’d assemble the instrument and run it upstairs to the dining room, where a curly-birch table overflowed with violins and where the acoustics were good. He’d play a soft scale or a Bach partita, soulfully, his mouth slightly open, his eyes closed. At such times, he seemed filled with art, with music, as if something else were driving him—even as he looked like a mad scientist, his shirt full of sawdust, a stray piece of masking tape stuck to the bottom of his foot. It didn’t matter. He’d grab a different violin off the table for comparison, play something more lively into the higher registers, then a snippet of a Beethoven sonata, switch back to the violin he’d been working on, and then run down to the basement again.

* * *

Photograph: Julia Meineke

Sue Ann Erb (far right), who teaches Suzuki-method violin in New Hampshire, poses with her students, all of whom play Meineke instruments. “I was astounded by how responsive and clear [they] were,” Erb says.
 

His results, which for so long had been frustratingly hit-and-miss, gradually hit more and missed less. Erb picked up one of his reworked Chinese instruments and admitted it sounded better than the ones he had made from scratch just a few years earlier. With each new insight, Meineke excitedly called Erb or Nancy Blum or one of the others in the fan club. It became a running joke how often he said he’d finally figured it out. Every time he had a breakthrough, though, a new problem confronted him. By 2010, the problems he grappled with had become so abstract that he couldn’t work them out at his bench; he needed to go for long walks, needed space to let his mind wander.

How could he describe the moment of the final discovery, the realization that each string interacts with the instrument independently, that the vector of the force changes in each phase of the string’s motion? “If the G string pulls one direction and gives you one tone,” he tries to explain, “and pulls the other direction and gives you a few cycles’ difference, you have dissonance. Because the nature of the interaction is neither totally elastic nor totally inelastic, it’s virtually impossible to write an equation that describes it.”

Impossible to write an equation that describes it. He had followed science to the end of a path and found himself at the intersection with something else. He had no precise language for it. But he suddenly understood the heart of the issue. He was dealing with momentum—mass × velocity—and to create sound that is beautiful, he needed to create a balanced momentum reaction. When the mass of the wood was properly balanced against each string, wood and strings could vibrate freely, without damping. The understanding was an epiphany.

He focused on altering the thickness in precise locations, just millimeters apart, in the instrument’s curved plates—on the right side opposite the left strings, the left side opposite the right strings—that balanced the action of the corresponding string. “When I realized that the shape and thicknesses of the back of the violin were determined by the need to conserve momentum for each string and required exquisite adjustment,” he says, “I realized that I had both an explanation and a method.” This was science. He could test the epiphany.

If he was wrong, his efforts would contribute something to the body of knowledge—maybe for some future luthier to advance further. If he was right, he believed that they could shift the very paradigm of violinmaking. In giddy moments, he speculated that the art of playing itself might be transformed, the way music spectacularly blossomed in the late baroque and classical periods, when the instruments from Cremona swept across Europe and showed musicians possibilities they had never before imagined.

If he was right. If people listened.

He took his newfound understanding to his workbench. Forty-five years after he’d heard an Albani violin in a music department storage room, 18 years after he’d first set out to answer a question, he discovered how the wood and the strings responded to each other—and he was able to replicate his success on another instrument, and another.

He sent new violins to Lexy Harrod, who was studying at the Boston Conservatory. “I could tell they were Cal instruments right away,” Harrod says. “Brilliant high end, nice blend all the way down to the lowest notes. Not just flashy and bright, a real core. They were easier to play than my current violin—I couldn’t believe it.”

Teddy Rankin-Parker tried a new Cal cello in Meineke’s living room. Rankin-Parker had graduated from Oberlin and was making a name in the Chicago avant-garde music scene. He barely touched the bow to the strings, and the entire room reverberated with the deep sound. He stopped, smiled, and looked at Meineke. “Cal,” he said. “It’s a whole new world. Am I blushing? This thing sounds like it’s plugged into the floor.”

Brant Taylor, a cellist in the CSO and a member of the music faculty at DePaul, played a Cal cello and said he could think of few other new instruments that could match its sound, at any price.

If he was right.

All along, Meineke, now 62, had insisted he wasn’t trying to solve the mystery of the Stradivarius. “It’s never been about reproducing a Cremona instrument,” he says. “It’s about making something better than the millions of instruments made each year that aren’t serving beginning players very well.”

There was every chance his research would have little impact in the wider world of violinmaking. Other scientific approaches had been advanced and had quietly retreated. It is a conservative craft, with perhaps too much invested in the mystique of the Italian instruments: too much financially, psychologically, professionally. Rebecca Elliott, a codirector of the Chicago School of Violin Making, says that teaching students to pay attention to the sound of their instruments as they build them would go too far beyond the school’s three-year curriculum.

Meineke listened to one of his high-level conspirators play an instrument, heard dissonance from the G string, and pictured in his mind exactly how to fix it. That’s when he knew.

In January 2011, Sue Ann Erb again flew from New Hampshire to Chicago and met Meineke at Midway. This time, something in his voice sounded different. “In all the years I’ve been doing this,” he told her, “I feel like I turn a corner, and I hit a wall. And then I turn another corner, and I hit a wall. For the first time with violins, I’ve turned a corner—and I don’t see a wall.”

The experiments were over. He said, “It’s time to tell the world.”

Cal Meineke has created a website where he has posted video recordings of his instruments. Check it out at meinekestringedinstruments.com.

Photograph: Julia Meineke