A432

By the time someone got around to approving this post a week or more had past (a not unusual response lag). This put my question the middle of page three (by design, I suspect), based on the date of the attempted posting. So nobody ever saw it. (ditto). One more time : who else in Mittenwald (or elsewhere ?) used this identifier ?

Georg Carol Klotz used the same three notches as an identifier. Did others use it also ?

Ponding wood was standard practice at one time in some places for a reason.

A surprise there. From the little I could see of the name (& location), given its age, I assumed it was a Gemunder. Live and learn.

Even a semi-"good" bow should not have its silver elements buffed, to preserve as much of the original surfaces as are left. Old bows did not have mirror surfaces. Liquid (acid) works, but if I had to clean a ferrule, adjuster caps &c I'd use fuller's earth (diatomacius earth), lightly (the old way this was done) FWIW

Add: Seems I wrote without considering your compensation in string length liklihood. Sorry on that. Still, though, how many even semi-big timers play Magginis or da Salos, even adjusted ?

No one's mentioned anatto as a yellow->orange->red coloring agent. French-only ?

You're right, of course, Martin -- at least in theory. My comment was based on my first decent quality violin, one of the later 18th century oversized Mittenwalders (Joseph Kloz, 1782), which I had to play by ear without ever knowing why until much later -- its string length had been proportionate to its 360+ mm body length. Such niceties of adjustment as you perhaps take for granted today were not par for the course in the US smaller cities 70 years and more ago.

Lending a fiddle with a 361 mm LOB to someone learning to play is throwing him/her/it/whatever a screwball. Hills re-made those (as noted) for a reason. Keyboards (both typewriter and piano-organ types) have standard dimensions, for easy switching from one to another. When the notes are further apart, the whole left hand is back to square one to get the intonation right. And no, playing by ear for six months while re-learning is not viable for non-amateurs. FWIW

A Latin inscription found on some early bowed stringed instruments: VIVA FUI IN SILVIS DUM DURA OCCASIA SECURI DUM VIXI FACURI MORTUA DULCE CANO (When) I lived in the forest; a cruel axe felled me. In life I was mute; now in death I sing sweetly.

The pistol shown with the knife is English, ca. 1700-1750, FWIW.

The head/scroll are almost exactly right for Matthias, except for the forehead being just enough flat to notice, like the guy ran out of wood there from trying to get by with a marginally too-small blank. If everything else were right about it though, it would pass muster as a MA 8n exceptional conditi9n, with no problem (from what the oicture shows). The f-holes kill it as an Anybody Alban though, without needing to look further. I suspect, FWIW, that it's a composite (head not original to the body). YMMV.

Both Roisman's (Budapest Quartet) A. Gagliano cello and the GdG Silverstein (Boston) played have poplar backs. Both have (had) unusually warm, full voices but lack (lacked -- modern strings might change that) the focused projection needed to be soloist war horses. This is par for the course with non-maple backs/ribs.

The FB's thicker on the treble side -- not humped in the middle.

That kind of abrasion wear, parallel to the fingerboard, is from the fiddle rattling around in a one-size-fits-all-case, hitting and rubbing back and forrh against the (often much too heavily) rosined hair of the bow a few inches above it. Nobody completely misses the fingerboard with the left hand fingers while trying to play unless too drunk to manage the bow either, and pizzicato doesn't require r.h. contact with anything but the tip of one finger with the string it plucks (while holding the bow, usually). FWIW