Stradivarius Tells A Story

Everything is connected, if only you can see the connections.

'Horizon' is one of the few documentary series that I find thorough and interesting. And being broadcast on the BBC, it is not subject to the worst that can be done to a documentary, to break it with adverts. Thus ensuring that after every break, the documentary is summarized to remind the modern day viewer of what they have already seen, reducing a television hour, to around 45 minutes.

This week, I watched an extraordinary documentary about the way in which weather extremes are becoming more common. And why this might be the case.

It is a fascinating insight into the different ways in which weather systems affect the world we live in, and indeed are affected by the Sun itself.

One of the most interesting threads which I have drawn from the programme was the use as an example of a Stradivarius violin. Made towards the end of the 18th century, it was the timber from which the violin was made which it was claimed has resulted in the quality of the sound produced by this most extraordinary of instruments.

In essence, the timber from which the carcass of a Stradivarius instrument is made is so finely grained that this must be the fundamental reason for the quality of the sound produced by the instrument. In the right hands.

The timber from which these instruments were made would have been grown during the preceding 200 years, mainly during the 17th century.

It was reckoned through the examination of ice cores that this coincided with a period of extreme cold in the northern hemisphere, which therefore meant that the trees from which the timber to make the instruments had been sourced had grown very slowly. And therefore, each year of growth for such trees was closer together, making for the unique materials from which the Stradivarius violins were made.

To some extent, I have had personal experience of this quality of timber, in that during the 1990s I spent most of my time restoring a 17th-century house on the Norfolk/Suffolk border.

The house had been built in around 1690, this date being fairly certain because in 1688 in the small Suffolk town in which the house was situated, there had been a fairly catastrophic fire that had destroyed most of the timber framed houses in that part of the town.

This small town was navigable to the sea, about 20 miles away, until sluices were built on the river that provided access to the sea in about 1932. This meant that the Norfolk sailing boats of that period, flat bottomed so that they could negotiate this narrow river, would be able to transport goods to and from Holland and the Baltic countries.

This meant that the house we were restoring had been built with Dutch bricks and pantiles, and that the internal room divisions consisted of Baltic first growth timber boarding, timber which had grown extremely slowly in the Baltic forests, and which was therefore finely grained and most beautiful when cut into wide boards that were used for the internal room divisions of the house.

Much of the original boarding survived intact behind Gypsum plasterboard that had simply being tacked directly to the wooden wall boards.

This preserved in places almost 300 years of wallpaper, including some extraordinary survivals, from a period in the 18th century when just about the only dye that was available to wallpaper manufacturers was an easily identifiable blue.

In other parts of the wall boarding, many layers of limewash still remained, a material which would have kept at bay any insect infestation.

The boards had been cut to a thickness of about an inch and a quarter, and the quality of the timber when simply scrubbed and oiled was quite phenomenal.

We kept some areas of the original limewash, and in the kitchen an area with many layers of the original wallpapers.

I don’t think I had quite appreciated the way in which the materials from which the house had been reconstructed after the great Fire of 1688 displayed so much on the way in which European climate has varied over the centuries, but the comparison with the Stradivarius violins is compelling.

In outline, what the documentary suggested was that the records kept quite carefully during the 17th and 18th centuries of the Sun provide an insight into the way in which there is a 300 year cycle during which sunspot activity reduces to a minimum, resulting in a substantial reduction in the amount of ultraviolet radiation that reaches the Earth.

Thus affecting weather systems that result in just the kind of cold weather that we have started to experience in the northern hemisphere over recent winters.

This apparently is a consequence of changes in the way in which winds in the northern hemisphere transmit cold air from the Arctic to affect our immediate weather systems.

All of this is over and above whatever changes have been effected as a consequence of global warming.

The restoration of 17th-century house on the Suffolk border was perhaps the last major practical project in which I was engaged before I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Preventing me from perhaps further continual obsession with such projects.

And so, instead, I have the leisure to be able to contemplate the ways in which I have myself experienced this slow grown Baltic pine, which is of such superior quality to the pine timber grown commercially during the past century or so.

I do not play an instrument, although I have had the great privilege of working closely with skilled musicians, for whom a Stradivarius would sing.

But perhaps I have had the extraordinary honour to have had close contact with just the kind of timber that Stradivarius would have prized for the manufacture of his violins.