1810 – Where do we come from?

I was born on 8 August 1810 in Thomas Kennedy’s workshop at 16 Princes Street, Westminster, London – or so I believe.  It took only a couple of months for my skilled luthier to bring me to this birthing moment when my voice was finally heard, when the bow’s horse-hair lovingly caressed my strings, and my rich pinewood body resonated with my distinctive sound. 

A Love Story

It was Johann Peter Salomon, (the German impresario who had invited the famous Joseph ‘Papa’ Haydn to London in the 1790s) who approached Thomas Kennedy to say that Lord Burghersh, a prominent soldier, diplomat and amateur musician, wanted to give a violin as a wedding gift to his 16-year-old fiancee Priscilla Ann Wellesley Pole.  Lady Priscilla, related to the Duke of Wellington, was one of Salomon’s many young ‘well-to-do’ pupils.

(Lady Burghersch)

So, my life could be said to have originated in an emotional thought, crafted from the ‘desire’ of a young man in love with his bride.  Perhaps it was really in the expression of love that I was truly born!  Does all life begin with emotions rather than ideas?

And not only that.  Although my overall ‘shape’ is instantly recognisable with all its standard features – neck, belly, back, sounding-board, strings and fingerboard, etc, not unlike a shapely woman – Johann Salomon specifically asked for me to be made in the shape and form of a Stradivarius violin, with its distinctive flat belly.  

And so it was.

The origin of all things?

All this leads me, whenever I’m being played, to reflect upon the origin of things, especially those things which express a voice or produce a sound. For me, ‘playing’ involves an intimate emotional connection with another, a creative spiritual encounter between me and the souls, minds, spirits and bodies of the one playing me and those who are listening.  The shared relationship that is part of playing (and being played) will be explored countless times in this my story, my performance.

I’m left wondering if my unique distinctive voice, produced through my body when played, is somehow connected beyond and outside of ‘measured’ historical time and linked to a pre-existing timeless expression of love or ‘desire’.  Again, more of this later.

Instrumental Construction?

Now, here’s an image of my ‘insides’ – what do you think?

So much contemporary thought about the origin of all things (including the source of music and sound) has a mechanistic ‘framework’, in the fashion of the theologian and philosopher William Paley and his ‘God as Watchmaker’ ideas of 1802. After all, I do look like a static construction, don’t you think (above)?  But I am far more interested in the nature of my body, with its resonances, its sonic flow and flux, its relationships, and the significance of being a living organism – not as a construction of organised parts, however intricate. 

Did Thomas Kennedy, my luthier, really think of himself as a skilled engineer making an intricate instrument comparable to a pocket watch?  Surely, I am more mysteriously made than that!  I conclude that my creative life occurs when my body is played – not when it is described or analysed, manufactured or structured.

My ‘Singing Voice’

I have heard Thomas talk about the way he listens keenly for the ‘singing voice’ of the wood he chooses for his workshop, and he himself often sings or hums as he follows the grain, and balances the many resonances of my intricate form as it is shaped and woven together.

So, perhaps this mysterious and crucial matter of ‘where I have come from’ is more to do with being constantly shaped into an on-going timeless and pervading resonance, a sonic flow which is ever present, and far less to do with a mechanical ‘construction’ made outside and beyond me from a time passed.

Indeed, while Thomas Kennedy was weaving together my inward and outer parts in his workshop, something earth-shattering was afoot around him.  Robert Schumann, born the same year as me, struggled with what became known as ‘Romanticism’ – something which started to put William Paley and his ‘watchmaker theory’ into serious question.  Ludwig van Beethoven, too, seems to have entered into the struggle, famously railing against the distant, uninvolved God who dwelt, far off, in the heavens. By the time of my ‘birth’ in 1810, when Beethoven was 40, he had become totally deaf, making this aesthetic struggle even more acute.

This important matter of tension between the ‘mechanistic’ and the ‘Romantic’ will continue to be part of the struggle for ‘hearts and minds’ that I shared in, for many years to come. The developing technology of the 21^st century, especially AI, will promise to keep this struggle alive.

God within or without?

Could my feelings about origins and creativity apply to all things, I wonder?  Could it be that ‘God’ could be constantly involved, continuingly creating, singing, fiddling, adding strings to his bow, somehow? As a famous bishop (J A T Robinson) came to declare 150 years from now – ‘Can we not get rid of God ‘up there’ and God ‘out there’?  Surprisingly, the thought of God, residing in the heavens with objective rules and pre-ordained forms and structures, has considerable ‘staying power’, as we shall see – and hear.