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Its appearance and sound is oh-so familiar, but what’s the story behind the violin? Here’s some background to this most sweet and noble of musical instruments. The violin was essentially the result of amalgamating instruments like the fiddle and the rebec. Both were early bowed string instruments that were less finessed and a little more difficult...

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More than 4,500 years after an enterprising Mesopotamian stretched a few cords of catgut over a hollow wooden vessel to create the first lute, the craft of building string instruments reached a state of near-perfection in a humble workshop in Cremona, Italy. The craftsman’s name is still known around the world more than 300 years later, though his...

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A new research paper sheds more light on the craftsmanship of Stradivarius, with clues that take a look inside his venerated craftsmanship. Despite some evidence to the contrary, the violins of Stradivarius and Cremonese violin makers of the 17th and into the 18th centuries are still prized above that of more recent instruments. Musical and scienti...

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The “Hellier” Stradivarius, made in 1679 by the Italian violin maker Antonio Stradivari, is expected to achieve between £6 million and £9 million (US$7.5 million and US$11.3 million) at a July auction at Christie’s London, the auction house said Monday. Made by Stradivari (1644-1737) during the early stage of his career, the violin was his first at...

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What makes the sound of one violin preferable to another? Do some Stradivarius violins really have a special sound? To answer these questions, a multidisciplinary team coordinated by the CNR involved 70 violin makers in a listening experiment to evaluate the sound qualities of four violins, including a Stradivarius. The results, published in The Jo...

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Cremona is a city located in Lombardia and is famous all over the world for the production of violins but not only. If you are looking for what to see and do in Cremona this is definitely the article you were looking for. Here you can discover The Torrazzo and the Vertical museum, two of the main attractions of this Lombard city. But that’s not all...

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More than 450 years ago, Andrea Amati invented the modern violin in the Italian city of Cremona. For centuries, this has been the world’s hub of violin makers. Known as luthiers, these artisans are now helping drive a recovery in Cremona, which last year was decimated by Italy’s COVID-19 outbreak. As the pandemic quieted Italy last year, sweet melo...

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If you think of “Made in Italy,” two words spring to mind: quality and tradition. No business seems to embody them better than  violin-making these days. A quintessentially Italian craft, the making of stringed instruments is associated with the  Lombardy town of Cremona since the 16th century.  Stradivari, Guarneri del Gesù and Amati produced in t...

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Working in the shadow of the great masters, the violin-makers of Italy's Cremona are valiantly fighting a shrinking market and foreign competition as they seek perfection, one violin at a time.  The birthplace of Stradivarius, Cremona is a veritable laboratory for luthiers from all over the world, where violin workshops seem to be everywhere you lo...

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The Stradivarius violin is renowned as the perfect musical instrument. Playing one is a dream come true for any musician, and only the best in the world have had the wonderful opportunity to get close to one of the 450 that still exist. Their creator was Antonio Stradivari, a luthier who lived in Cremona from 1644 to 1737 and was famous for the par...

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