Summer housekeeping
Taking a bit of time to build a new page for our website
We are at Daniela’s mother’s place in the mountains, it’s raining so we worked on a web page that we longed wanted to add to our website. The page is not on yet, but it is basically about making instruments out of our research, a dream we hope to realise one day.
In recent years, we have found several instruments that are definitely “da spalla” but quite different from the instrument we make the most, what we today call Violoncello da Spalla, which is closely inspired by J. C. Hoffmann.
Some of these instruments are bigger, other smaller. The bigger ones usually show signs of being played in various different positions, often they have been modified, and we cannot know if a playing position is restricted to a period in time or not. The smaller ones instead show signed of being played only as da spalla, on the shoulder, and some of them are absolutely in original conditions. The most well known of them is the J. Wagner, but there are others worth investigating.
Back to our holiday in the mountains, while Alessandro is working at the layout of the webpage, I prepared some pic collages for it, and this made me go back to many memories of research trips, sweet memories for me! So, I thought I shall share them with you even if it’s just a work in progress and if you already saw most of them.
I should add here that I had no precise idea then on the correct process to make an instrument “the German way” without blocks, with the neck with the block in-built. I tried! Thanks to the generous advise of many friends, now I would do it better, following the correct “to-do list”.
Anyway, when we finally could compare live the two instruments, ours and the original J. Wagner from the first half of the 18th century, we were pleased with our work!
Other projects I’d love to pursue:
This newsletter, as the last one, has a different layout, because I am trying the mobile editor. However, I think I will go back to the usual web editor because this tool still misses some features that I like to use, like video embedding. What do you think? Is this layout somewhat easier for you to read, or more pleasant?
In my next newsletter I may share the new page online. By now, here is our website!
And this is us visiting museums in Markneukirchen, Leipzig, Lübeck, Oxford.
Of course, if you are interested in any of these unique da spalla instruments, get in touch!!
Congratulations!