The Street Symphony: Social Justice and Music Making

Bringing music to Los Angeles’ most disenfranchised people isn’t just a do-good project. It’s about summoning the best in all of us, the core of our beings.

What does it mean that accomplished musicians perform for and even work with the most disenfranchised parts of society in Los Angeles? What do the musicians, music directors and educators expect to achieve when working with the homeless people on Skid Row and inmates in county jails?

It helps to consider how music is fundamental to the human condition. We see it in primitive versions of flutes dating back tens of thousands of years, invariably made from animal bones with holes cut into them, found in archaeological digs from China to Europe to the Middle East, Africa, the Americas and Australia. The didgeridoos of Australian aboriginals look much like alpenhorns of Switzerland and the vuvuzelas of South Africa. And every culture of the world uses the human voice as a musical instrument.

The reason music is so universal is probed by social scientists that observe such things as how music fosters community cooperation and cohesion. One study conducted out of the University of Cambridge (Tai-Chen Rabinowitch, et al. 2012) identified that interaction between individuals in a group (the study was on children) who experience music over the course of an academic year show higher emotional empathy. Other research (U. Nilsson, Orebro University, Sweden 2009) shows heart bypass surgery patients exposed to music have higher levels of serum oxytocin, a beneficial hormone, than those without music.

These studies explain much of what is intuitive. Music is very present in modern life; it’s been a central part of culture and commerce for a thousand years.

But music is not available to everyone. Disenfranchised communities may lack for music in their educational systems, the homeless have few possessions and no electricity, and the incarcerated have far more violent sounds available to them than the sounds of fine stringed instruments, bassoons, flutes and trumpets.

This is why programs such as Los Angeles’ Street Symphony are vital. The core of the program is about social justice by way of professional and emerging artists who work among the city’s homeless and incarcerated communities. Its mission statement includes, “all people deserve access to a creative and expressive life.”

Street Symphony programs, which were founded in 2011, include “Music With A Mission,” which entails monthly concerts at Skid Row shelters and county jails. It also includes The Messiah Project, where excerpts of Handel’s masterpiece are performed along with stories and performances from current and formerly homeless artists. The organization’s Daniel Chaney Fellows Program explores “citizen-artistry” with fellows who receive a year of intensive instruction in musical performance and the intersection of arts and social justice (fellows include Skid Row community members alongside university and conservatory graduating artists). Street Symphony also provides musical education to inmates at five Los Angeles County jails.

We are all human beings after all. Music can and should be a part of everyone’s experience, regardless of where they live and what they own.

The Right and Wrong Ways to Use Bow Rosin

Between your instrument strings and the bow hair is something vital, the rosin. Too much or too little, applied the wrong way, can impair your playing.

The beginner violinist may think a small disk of coniferous tree sap, rosin, plays a minor or even unnecessary role in the creation of music. Au contraire! The right rosin, applied with expertise, can significantly affect how the instrument is played and the sound it creates.

The end goal of having just the right amount of rosin is to create warm, rich tones, with just the right amount of friction that enables smooth movement of the bow over the strings.

But it’s possible to have too much or too little rosin, or you might mishandle the rosin in ways that are detrimental to the bow or the instrument itself.

So let’s break that down:

The Goldilocks of Rosin: too much, too little - or just right

It IS possible to play without rosin on your bow but not advisable. It’s more work for the violinist or cellist who has to press harder on the strings. And even with that the results are a hollow, pale sound. Add a little (but inadequate) amount of rosin and the sound will improve. But the friction the rosin is intended to create will tend to be spotty, as will be the music.

Too much rosin will make the bow feel stickier as it moves across the strings. Excess rosin can generate a cloud of rosin dust as you play, and the sound will be harsh and scratchy. Rosin debris will fall onto the surface of the instrument and, over time, can damage the varnish and the wood.
For this reason, when working with fine instrument bows and fine stringed instruments, understanding of the proper rosining techniques is of utmost importance. The right amount of rosin allows easy movement of the bow, rich tones, and no excess. As a rule of thumb, it typically takes four or five strokes of rosin on the bow hair to achieve this.

Correct handling and application of rosin

It also matters how the rosin is applied. There are a few steps to take:

1. Tighten the bow. Slack hairs will accept the rosin unevenly and it becomes possible the rosin will touch the bow wood (not good).
2. Don’t touch the hairs. Natural skin oils are bad for the bow hairs because it prevents the rosin from binding.
3. “Activate” a stick or disc of rosin when it is new. By this we mean scratch it lightly with the edge of a quarter to slightly roughen it. You only need to do this when the rosin is new.
4. Cover the entire length of the bow hairs, from end to tip, for even playing.
5. Rotate the rosin as you apply it. This is to avoid creating grooves in the rosin that cause it to break before it’s used entirely.
6. Wipe off excess rosin on the bow stick and the strings after playing. You want an even distribution and to avoid caking.

A final note on which kind of rosin is best, as well as the quantity: That depends on the ambient temperature and humidity, and the type of stringed instrument being played. Violins and violas, with smaller strings, need lighter (in color, density and stickiness) rosin. Darker rosins are stickier, heavier and more suited to the cello and bass. With higher temperatures and humidity, too much rosin can get stickier. And of course, vigorous playing will heat up the bow and strings as well. Players need to pay attention to all such conditions and how it affects the rosin and their music.

When in doubt, take a trip to your local violin shop and ask the local expert.

Carl Becker and the Lady Blunt Stradivarius Violin

Now the most highly valued violin on the planet, the iconic instrument was refurbished almost 40 years ago in Carl Becker and Son’s simple Chicago studio.

Today, a non-descript condominium building stands at 1416 W. Belmont Avenue in Chicago. This is in the re-gentrified Lakeview neighborhood of the city’s North Side, an area that not long ago was tired and tattered, a stretch of cash exchange depots and tattoo parlors. At this particular address once stood the second floor studio of Carl Becker and Son, violinmakers and repairers of fine instruments, in a building that evidently was demolished sometime in the 1990s.

What probably few people then and perhaps no person today on that block realize is a very valuable Stradivarius violin was “resident” there for a while as it was being refurbished by the Carls Becker, father (Carl G.) and son (Carl F.).

The Becker operation is obviously a family business. It goes back to the late 1940s and their descendants continue their craft today. The son in the firm’s name was Carl Frederick Becker, who died in 2013 at the age of 93. His children and grandchildren now operate the firm in the city’s Loop (central business district) a few miles south and, notably, within walking distance of Chicago’s Lyric Opera and Symphony Center concert halls.

The Beckers have a long-established world-class reputation. So perhaps it shouldn’t be so remarkable that in the 1970 and 1971 – in the simple second-floor walkup shop on Belmont Avenue where the Beckers crafted and repaired fine stringed instruments – that a particularly well-known and extraordinarily valuable Stradivarius violin was kept there for an important repair.

This instrument is known as the “Lady Blunt Strad,” so named because it was once owned by Lady Anne Blunt, the daughter of Ada Lovelace (a mathematician and writer who conceived the idea of the computer) and granddaughter of England’s Lord Byron. It was made in 1721 by the master Cremonese luthier, and was last sold at auction in 2011 for $15.9 million USD, the highest price ever claimed by a musical instrument.

That such an expensive and exquisite instrument, probably the most valuable Stradivarius in the world, spent several months in the Becker studio in Chicago isn’t quite so surprising for anyone who knows the Becker family and their work. The shop under their name had only been open for a couple of years when the Lady Blunt was placed in their hands, but both father (Carl G.) and son (Carl F.) had previously worked with the respected William Lewis & Son, also in Chicago. Their skills were well known and they easily drew customers with repair-worthy violins, violas and cellos.

Father Carl G. was well known as a violin maker. Son Carl F. crafted over 500 instruments with his father, spending the rest of his career in the repair business and making a modest amount of instruments on his own.

The Lady Blunt Strad was owned by Tarisio Auctions when Becker repaired it. Once it was restored, it sold for $201,000 at auction. The buyer (Robert Lowe) owned it for 30 years, after which it was acquired by the Nippon Music Foundation for $10 million. The Foundation put it up for charitable sale to benefit the victims of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami (in Japan), where it sold for $15.9 million. It is rarely played.

The Becker shop repaired other Stradivariuses, including the Muntz Strad. Carl F. Becker was also a founding member of both the International Society of Violin and Bowmakers the American Federation of Violin and Bowmakers - pretty heady stuff for a firm that started out on Belmont Avenue in Chicago.

How to Clean Your Stringed Instrument at Home

Minor maintenance of violins, violas and cellos can and should be done by the player. Know what you’re doing – including when to call a professional.

All stringed instruments ¬– violins, cellos and violas – are in certain respects alive. The strings, the various components (neck, pegbox, pegs, strings, bow and bow strings, the body and finish, even inside the instrument) have components that are subject to dirt, dust, your perspiration, and excess rosin. Without proper maintenance those components can suffer ¬– and so too might your playing.

Some maintenance and repairs are best done by your preferred local violin shop (your violin maker, who often is the violin repairer). But on a regular basis the violinist, cellist, bassist, etc. should maintain certain habits and routines to minimize damage and maximize the life and performance of his or her instrument.

This is equally true of higher-end, fine stringed instruments as well as student and intermediate models. Proper, ongoing maintenance is just the rule of the day.

Think of the approach to cleaning your instrument at home in three parts:

Step 1: Before playing

• Wash your hands.
• Check to make sure you cleaned it after playing it last time (if not, follow Step 2 before playing, and again after finishing).

Step 2: After playing

• Look at what a mess you made! Rosin dust, human sweat …
• Get out two lint-free dry cloths. These can be microfiber fabrics, such as those used to clean eyeglasses and computer and phone screens. Or, a thin cotton cloth that has been washed a sufficient number of times there is not fiber residue. Technically speaking, no fabric is completely lint-free; it’s a matter of how much (less is more where it comes to cleaning stringed instruments).
• Remove the shoulder rests from violins and violas.
• The first cloth should be used to wipe the strings of bow rosin and other accumulated dirt.
• The second cloth is to clean off the neck and body of the instrument. Why a second cloth? The rosin dust on the first can scratch the varnish on other parts of the instrument.

Periodically (as needed, depending on frequency and duration of play)

• A “magic rub eraser” is another means for removing rosin, but only from non-porous surfaces. Considered an “art eraser,” they are made with soft vinyl and are sold under different brand names (Prismacolor, Pentel, Paper Mate, Faber-Castell and Bazic, among others).
• Never use alcohol, acetone or paint thinner to remove rosin or grease on strings or the body of the instrument.
• For insistent marks or accumulated dirt on the instrument body, see your violin maker for violin cleaning products.
• The bridge might have collected rosin as well. In hard to reach areas use a cotton swab (Q-tip). On other areas use a soft cloth.
• To polish the violin, viola, cello or bass, use only instrument (not furniture) polish purchased from your luthier.
• Clean the bow also with a light cloth, wiping in the direction of the hairs, taking care to use a light touch and not going against the grain.
• Very valuable, antique instruments should be cleaned by professional violinmakers.

Keep in mind the violin case, its home when not being played, should be clean as well. A vacuum hose should be used on the case to suck away dust.

A clean instrument is one with a long life and brilliant sound. Careful and constant attention makes it happen.

Getting a Fine Instrument Insured: Some Helpful Tips

Fine instruments are beautiful works of craftsmanship, and very vulnerable to come what may. Being careful means obtaining an insurance policy.

There are horror stories about fine stringed instruments getting damaged. You’ve heard them. Despite meticulous care and love a musician puts into his or her instrument, it can be destroyed in an instant.
Wunderkind David Garrett was age 26 in 2008 when it happened. After the end of a concern at London’s Barbican he tripped on a wet outdoor staircase, fell – and landed on his 1772 Giovanni Guadagnini violin. It was shortly after he finished paying off the £ 1.2 million loan to purchase it. The accident, even though the violin was in its case, was catastrophic for the instrument. Garrett was uninjured.

“I felt as if I’d lost a friend,” the virtuoso told a writer for The Guardian newspaper. “The body was cracked all over. I must have sat there for 10 or 15 minutes. I didn’t shout or cry. I just stared. I was in shock. Some moments in life are almost impossible to grasp – surreal. I was in a state of disbelief.”

Garrett was in many respects fortunate. He believes the violin in its case, strapped to his back, may have prevented bodily injury. And the fine violin was insured. It took a violin shop seven-months to repair the violin at a cost of £60,000 and restored the instrument to playing condition.

Insurance works – even for student instruments

Not every violin is worth a million dollars (or Pounds Sterling, in the case of UK currency). But even if an instrumentalist invests only $500 in a violin, viola, cello, base or harp, that is money that came through someone’s hard work. Fortunately, there is a way to insure almost everything. The trick is to pay only as much as is required to prevent a complete loss resulting from a theft, accident or natural disaster.

Here are key considerations in how to insure a musical instrument:

Value of the instrument – Of course repair and replacement costs for an instrument of any value is the goal. For non-professionals, a lower-cost instrument will have a lower insurance cost. Professional instruments valued above $5,000 will of course require a better policy at a higher premium. Every instrument, every player’s circumstances and every insurer must be considered to identify instrument value and insurance cost.

Existing homeowner or renter insurance policy – Lower-value instruments may well fall under a home/renter’s policy. But some only cover the instrument in the home, or for damage due to theft or fire but not floods and earthquakes. Theft from a car might be treated differently than from the home. Ask your insurance agent.

Travel? – Boarding planes, passing through immigration, staying in hotels and playing in unfamiliar concert halls can bring different risks to the instrument. Insurers will want to know about this in order to write an appropriate policy.

Larger instruments cost more – That fine cello is larger, easier to bump into, subject to different conditions while traveling, and doesn’t accompany the player into every room the way a prized violin might. This adds to overall vulnerability as well as to insurance premiums.

There are several different insurance companies that specialize in musical instruments (ValuePenguin, Heritage, Harmonia, Clarion, Anderson, Merz-Huber, and others). But household-name companies (Allstate, Farmers, Liberty Mutual, etc.) offer policies as well.

In case you think Garrett’s experience was isolated, think again. Cellist Peter Stumpf simply left his Stradivarius cello on his front doorstep after performing with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. It was stolen, damaged, dumped, then found by a nurse whose boyfriend offered to use his carpentry skills to fashion it into a CD rack (this was in 2004). The $3.5 million instrument made the news, so fortunately the nurse and her boyfriend became aware of it’s value and returned the instrument to Stumpf. The cello needed repairs – fortunately, a luthier was able to restore it to fine condition.

Geared Pegs for Stringed Instruments

The “planetary geared” peg makes tuning easier on violins, violas, and cellos. There are several additional reasons to favor them.

Geared pegs are a newer innovation when it comes to useful – some may say ingenious – stringed instrument accessories. Widely available both online as well as at the local violin shop, these pegs boil down larger points of difference – some might say conflicts – within a relatively simple, small thing.

If you’re new to what a geared peg is, here’s the simplest explanation: the tension and therefore tuning of strings on any type of stringed instrument (violin, viola, cello, bass, ukulele, etc.) can happen at either end: the pegbox at the top of the instrument, or the fine tuners at the bottom of the instrument (toward the chinrest on a violin). But for the most part, the tuning pegs at the scroll end are most frequently adjusted to achieve proper tuning.

Historically, these pegs were held in place and adjusted by friction between the peg and the surrounding pegbox wood. But a geared peg is more technically advanced. Hidden inside what appear to be traditional pegs are a set of planetary gears –¬ so named because they involve a smaller (the “sun”) and larger (“ring,” like planets) toothed gears – that do two things. One is that they allow for more precise tuning because it takes bigger, more exaggerated movement by the hands of the instrumentalist to achieve smaller changes in the tension. Second, it makes the process of tuning easier for those hands (i.e., less pressure and strength is required).

So what’s the conflict?

For starters, Stradivari, Guarneri and all other pre-20th century violinmakers never worked with geared pegs. These are modern innovations, arguably in the category of steel (not gut) strings and composite (not pernambuco) bows. Purists may scoff, but under many conditions and circumstances these newer innovations make sense. What’s interesting is that makers of geared pegs are careful to ensure the appearance of the pegs is preserved, not visible to anyone observing the instrument even at close distance.

Another conflict that is essentially solved with geared pegs is how abrupt humidity differences require acclimatization of the instrument and therefore frequent tuning. This is because wood pegs and the pegbox into which they are inserted are made of different types of wood that respond differently to humidity and aridity. The traveling violinist, violist or cellist knows how important this can be.

But perhaps the conflict resolution that geared pegs provide that is of greatest benefit to the vast majority of players is the ease with which geared pegs are adjusted. Children and older adults, or anyone with compromised wrist biomechanics, may lack the sufficient strength to execute the somewhat awkward maneuver of traditional pegs.

Is the sound different when played on an instrument with geared pegs? As with gut vs. steel and pernambuco vs. composite, it mostly boils down to the player and their pragmatic considerations (and having a good luthier to install them). In some cases it’s almost impossible to know, since those gears are hidden within the traditional-appearing pegs.

“Violins of Hope” Immortalize Music of Holocaust Musicians

While not intrinsically great instruments, Jewish-owned violins, cellos and violas that somehow survived the concentration camps live on in concert. 

Among the many perverse facts of the Holocaust is there were camp orchestras. Talented instrumentalists from the Jewish and “Gypsy” (Roma) communities involuntarily held by the murderous regime were put to work to provide music. Their audiences were new arrivals as they disembarked from cattle cars, some as they were led to certain death while others judged healthy enough to work to barracks. Some of the musicians were forced to entertain their captors at parties.

It’s impossible to not mentally summon the theme from Schindler’s List, the 1993 movie about the Holocaust (composed and conducted by John Williams, featuring violinist Itzhak Perlman). The music performed by the camp orchestras included marches, parlor music, dance music, popular music of the day, film and operetta melodies, the works of Richard Wagner and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. In Auschwitz composer Henryk Krol wrote Arbeitslagermarsch, the Concentration Camp Labor March.

Since 1996, the father and son team of Amnon and Avshalom Weinstein, based in Tel Aviv, have been collecting the violins, violas and cellos that were owned by these camp musicians before and during World War 2. The collection has grown to more than 60 instruments, each with a story: Some were used in the camps; some were tossed from those trains as they were headed to the camps. The collection is known as the Violins of Hope.

One instrument in the collection, the Auschwitz violin, was made around 1850 in Germany and was purchased in the post-War years from a penniless survivor. Like many of the stringed instruments, it was neither rare nor valuable. Another German-made violin, circa 1900, was tossed from a train traveling from France by a desperate man who said “In the place where I now go I don’t need a violin – here, take my violin so it may live!” A worker obliged his request but never played it. Decades later his children told the story to a violinmaker in the South of France who purchased it and turned it over to the Weinsteins for the Violins of Hope project.

But Violins of Hope is more than instruments that the Weinsteins have restored to playing condition. It’s a series of concerts using these instruments, held around the world, accompanied by discussions on the significance of the instruments. Despite the fact these are not Stradivarius violins, virtuosos the likes of Shlomo Mintz (Jerusalem), David Russell (music professor at the University of North Carolina) and others play them. Upcoming concerts in 2019 and 2020 are in Louisville, Kentucky; Fort Wayne, Indiana; San Francisco; and Los Angeles.

Amnon Weinstein told National Public Radio in 2012 that violins were commonly displayed on the walls of Jewish homes, particularly among Orthodox Jews who were forbidden from displaying portraits or sculpture. He was first asked to restore one such violin in the early 1960s by a musician-survivor who had been part of the Auschwitz Men’s Orchestra, but Weinstein was repulsed by the presence of ashes inside the instrument and refused to work with it – in part because he himself had lost many family members to the Holocaust.

Weinstein’s emotions on that had softened by the 1990s when he launched Violins of Hope. “All instruments have a common denominator,” he says on his website. “They had to do with the war. To be more specific, they had to do with the Holocaust –­ death or survival. And hope. All instruments were symbols of hope and a way to say, remember me, remember us. Life is good, celebrate it for those who perished, for those who survived. For all people.”

That clearly includes the doomed violinist on that French train. His violin miraculously survives. “The sound of violins is often compared to the beauty of the human voice,” Weinstein writes. “When played with talent and spirit, it is known to reach out and touch hearts. This was the role of violins in the war –­ to touch hearts, kindle hope for better times and spread it around. Wherever there was music, there was hope.”