Instruments of Change

We call violins, violas, cellos and basses a “family” of strings, but they’re more like fraternal than identical twins. Each has a distinct timbre that comes through whenever they play as a group.

Creating a family that sounds like one instrument across the whole range, from soprano to bass, was a goal of instrument builders during the Renaissance when the harmonious sounds of vocal music were the ideal. Luthiers (the term for makers of stringed instruments) built “chests of viols”--sets of stringed instruments matched in design and sound to achieve blend and balance.

But with the rise of virtuoso playing during the Baroque and Classical periods, there was a move away from homogeneity and toward individuality; each instrument in a set of strings began to have its own characteristic tone “colors.” Enter Carleen Hutchins who has returned to ideals of the Renaissance by working out the complicated engineering and physics needed to design and build sets of violins that blend and balance.

An ensemble dedicated to her work, the Hutchins Consort, a Southern California-based octet founded in 1999 by contrabass violinist Joe McNalley, will play tonight at the Irvine Barclay Theatre.

It took Hutchins more than 40 years to come up with her acoustic formula. “I was just having fun on an experiment,” said Hutchins, 90, from her home in Montclair, N.J. “[Composer] Henry Brant called me. He was looking for a violin maker crazy enough to work on the idea,” she said.

An amateur string player, she had degrees in education and biology, but learned acoustics from F. A. Saunders, a Harvard University physics professor with whom she began working in 1947. She learned carpentry from friends, and her work as a luthier started as a hobby.

Hutchins took instruments apart, made changes and then reglued the pieces. She and Saunders founded a society that enlisted help from instrument builders, musicians and acousticians.

“We tried everything. We tried making instruments deep and shallow. We were making instruments that we could play.”

Was it frustrating? “You believe it,” said Hutchins.

A Guarnerius owned by Jascha Heifetz served as a prototype in other forms of analysis. It ultimately revealed to Hutchins the key secret of what makes a violin sound like a violin. Violins have two resonant spots, she said. “We found them in very different places in a viola and a cello.”

Calibrating the

Acoustic Formula

After figuring out mathematical ratios for the resonances, she began to project them onto violins of different sizes. Her instrument building took off like a shot. “We have seven full sets going now,” she said.

A set of Hutchins violins has a range of seven and a half octaves, from an octave below a standard string bass to an octave and a half higher than a standard violin. The Hutchins mezzo violin has the same tuning as a standard violin. The Hutchins alto has the same tuning as a standard viola. The Hutchins baritone parallels a cello. The Hutchins contrabass is closest in tuning to a string bass, but the Hutchins bass is closest in size to that instrument.

The other Hutchins violins (treble, soprano and small bass) allow for a wide distribution of parts that helps the octet reproduce the full range of orchestral music.

McNalley, 37, heard one of the sets on loan to UC San Diego, where he studied string bass, from 1983 to 1987. He loved the sound.

“I started designing [a bass violin] in the late ‘80s. I had gotten most of the basics down, but I couldn’t figure out one of the physics problems. After years of scratching my head, I got Carleen’s number and called her up. We started talking about my physics problem, which was no problem for her.”

Hutchins asked McNalley if he could get a group together that would play on one of the full octets of instruments she had built. “Two months later, I ended up on plane to New Jersey. This was in 1999. I brought them back to California,” McNalley said.

But it hasn’t been easy.

First, the musicians had to learn to play the Hutchins violins. “Fingering is obviously different from a conventional instrument,” McNalley said. “The body lengths and the string lengths are different.”

Hutchins likes to demonstrate the differences in sound by juxtaposing one of her instruments with a traditional one. “That really sets people on edge,” she said. “The sound is so much better, clearer, more powerful; there’s more dynamic range. They just outplay all the normal instruments.”

The Hutchins Consort faces the same challenges as traditional groups--raising funds and finding an audience. It also has to build a unique repertory--classical works aren’t written for these instruments; they must be transcribed. In some cases, the Hutchins Consort has commissioned new works for the ensemble.

“We have all the problems of a chamber orchestra and all the problems of a small chamber music group,” McNalley said. “We operate on a shoestring budget. The submitted budget is about $100,000 more than the actual money we’ve raised. So certain artistic directors are not getting paid. It’s an uphill battle. But it’s a battle we think we’re doing very well at.”

His group will be in residence at the Leeds Center in Kentucky in April and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in May.

“Those are big breaks for us,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of coals in the fire.”

Meanwhile, Hutchins is looking to the future. “We have full-scale designs of each instrument that we’re working to get computerized so people can get a design off their computers and a set of instructions about how to tune the plates and handle the wood.... “This is a bootstrap operation, trying to create a demand for something where there’s been nothing. We’ve been working in a vacuum but gradually we’re filling it in. It’s long and slow.”

The Hutchins Consort, tonight at 8, Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. $12-$32. (949) 854-4646.