Blooming spring flowers greet us! We are doing our annual pilgrimage to Baker Violin Shop in Dummerston VT. We go to get our violins tuned up and today Lily is moving up to a 3/4 size.
The shop is so gloriously beautiful.
I love the light shining on the curvy honey-colored instruments.
These are tucked away in a glass case.
These are stringless, waiting on the chair for help.
These are the four violins Lily gets to choose from.
Testing them out and finding the perfect one.
The process was so sensitive and individual, I finally blurted out, "It's like being in Ollivander's Wand Shop. The wand picks the wizard! The violin picks the player." David Baker nodded and agreed, saying, "When I saw that scene in the movie, I thought, Yes! That's the only thing that describes this process."
When I am in his shop I have such a deep clarity that a violin is a sacred magical instrument that creates musical vibrations from rubbing together horsehair over metal, surrounded by wood and readied with tree sap (rosin) to vibrate in a way that moves the soul. It'a amazing! Some of these instruments are really ancient.
This time he adjusted my sound post, a little dowel made of Spruce wood, inside the violin. I didn't even know it was in there! He talked about it. I looked it up.
"It is not without good reason that the French word for sound post is
"Ame" which means soul. The sound post is indeed the "soul" of the
instrument, even a slight change in position of a couple of millimetres
can alter the quality of the tone"
Here Georgia is rummaging through his desk and collecting mutes, metal attachments to put on the strings so you can practice and not wake up a sleeping household. Everything in his studio is beautiful and useful art.
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