UNM Dean a Master Craftsman of String Instruments

Saturday, October 25, 2003
UNM Dean a Master Craftsman of String Instruments
By John Fleck
Albuquerque Journal Staff Writer

When violin maker Peter White's scientist friends found out he was giving a talk to a bunch of physicists, they offered two standard answers for weaseling out when the inquisitive scientists began asking questions:

"I don't know."

"It depends. There are a lot of variables."
There is, to be sure, science lurking in the shadows behind the making of a violin.

Hologram interferometry can tell you the eigenmodes as sound moves through the instrument's wooden top and back plates. A chemist can tell you the makeup of Augustus Stradivarius' varnish.

But no scientific instrument can duplicate Peter White's hands.

"What I learned to do over the last 27 years is just to use my hands," White said during a Friday afternoon talk to the University of New Mexico Department of Physics and Astronomy.

White was this week's speaker for the department's regular Friday afternoon colloquium.

The usual colloquium topics sound considerably more left- brained, things like "Quark-Gluon Plasma" and "Observations of Warm-Hot Intergalactic Gas."

But White drew a big crowd Friday afternoon for his meeting between art and science.

White himself seems a bit unlikely cast in the master violin maker's role. In his day job, he is a professor of English and dean at UNM, but for most of the last three decades his private passion has been the delicate woodworking of the violin maker's art.

He has made more than 200 violins, violas, cellos and mandolins over the years, eschewing the high technology used by some instrument makers today for the hand tools of the traditional European masters.

He understands the difference in density between Idaho spruce and Oregon spruce. He can feel the stiffness and suppleness of the wood as he planes it, one shaving at a time, into the perfect shape.

Technology can measure the way the wood vibrates, tell the violin maker where it needs to be shaved a little more. White prefers his hands. Gently, he twists the top plate, pushes here and there with his thumbs.

"I can feel exactly by doing that where this plate is stiff," he said.

One can study the way Stradivarius and the other great old masters did it scientifically, trying to isolate the variables?- the stiffness, the wood type, the varnish, the way the neck attaches to the body, the bridge that holds the strings.

But the catchy answer his scientist friends gave him is really in the end a reason why making a great violin is so hard?- "There's a lot of variables."

"All those variables go into making a violin," he said.