We shape the world and the world shapes us.
When you smash a violin, you get a pile of
useless fragments, not smaller violins.
Weighing almost nothing, alive, pulsing with
air between soft spruce, and hard maple, the
violin’s sound easily fills an auditorium.
Our sophisticated self-image leads us to think
that we have solved the riddle of the 3rd sound.
Play a D and an F-sharp together, and we hear
another D two octaves below. This is the
difference tone reality inside our own ears.
But when played on a violin, the open D string
begins to resonate as well. Sympathetic resonance,
similar differences, like resonating with like.
We think we have solved the riddle of sound.
Yet their instruments, and perhaps also their music—
of Stradivari and Vivaldi—are clearly superior to
our own. They meditated upon, wrote whole
treatises, on the mystery of the third sound,
of the lower D emerging out of nothing. And
they listened, listened closely, with a sustained
seriousness of a slowly growing mountain pine.
Even our exact copies of their instruments
do not compare.
We think we have found a better way of thinking
about sound. But even the old Bach, as hard as
he tried, could not duplicate Vivaldi’s miracle of
a bassline emerging from higher thirds,
out of thin air!