LUTHERIE 2012
Saturday 28th April 2012 10.30 - 4.30
Barnbygate Methodist Church Barnbygate, Newark, Nottinghamshire, NG24 1PX
Why is the violin so hard to play?"
After a first degree in mathematics at Cambridge, Jim Woodhouse did a PhD and post-doctoral work on the acoustics of the violin, in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge (this work being inspired by a hobby interest in building instruments). He then worked in a consultancy firm for a few years, on a variety of problems in structural vibration, before joining the Engineering Department of the University in 1985. His research interests all involve vibration, and musical instruments have continued to form a major part.
Page in preparation
The Speakers
Professor Jim Woodhouse
Ben Hebbert
Violin making in England from the beginning: 1500-1700
Research into British violin making up to now has never really gone further than the eighteenth-century. Makers such as Rayman, Wise, Urquhart and Pamphilon from the seventeenth-century are well known to us, but our idea of an 'early English school' is dominated by the eighteenth-century makers of Stainer copies, including such makers as Wamsley and Duke. In my lecture I want to look at English traditions of violin making looking as far back as 1538 and earlier when Italian musicians and instrument makers were lured to Engliand by Henry VIII, and readdress an understanding of the nature of the early English school and its development.
Ben Hebbert teaches at West Dean College, and is completing a doctorate on early English instrument makers at the University of Oxford: The Rise of Commercialism: Instrument Makers and the Material Environment of Music in Early Modern London. He has worked as a curatorial fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and was a violin specialist for Christies. He regularly writes for the BVMA Newsletter, and for the Strad.