Ep 20. Francesco Rugeri Part 2 with Dan Larson of Gamut Strings and Jason Price

Come and discover in this episode why your cello is the size it is!

We continue looking at the life of Francesco Rugeri and how his career intersected with other well known masters such as Guarneri and Stradivari. 

The advent of wound strings will also play a part in piecing together the puzzle of how Francesco Rugeri was able to make smaller cellos 50 years before Stradivari even tried.

Transcript

  Okay, so I'm here with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker.  Hello  and , this little segment is we're gonna give you a, the secret how to remember the difference between Francesco Rugeri and Giovanni Baptista Rogeri

Antoine Lespets

can you talk about your memo technique? I fun for remembering the difference between Rogeri and Rugeri

Yeah. I say memo technique, technique? or just a memo technique?

Oh, I thought, no, it's a memo technique because it's for memory, right? It's to remember.  So memo technique.

Yeah. All right. So my memo technique to remember the difference between Rugeri and Rogeri. It's a very simple one. Um, I just think Rugeri with the U is rude because he stays in Cremona.

So he's, that's his, um, Rugeri is in Cremona and Rogeri, goes rogue with a O  to, so he goes to Brescia, he leaves Cremona and he goes to Breescia. So Rogeri in Bresecia because he goes rogue and Rugeri in Cremona because, because he's, he's so rude. He never wants to leave Cremona.  Yes. 

Yeah. So it's not necessarily true, but the whole idea of a memo technique is just to remember.

Yeah. Don't worry if you're in Cremona, I've got nothing against you and you don't have to write there. And you can stay in Cremona like all you like. You might not be rude. Yeah. You don't have to. It's just a technique to remember. Rugeri or Rogeri. Thank you Antoine. You're welcome.  Rogeri in Brescia, Rugeri in Cremona.

Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles. A podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting, violin makers of history.  I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French violin making school some years ago now and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de Lutherie in Mirecourt.

As well as being a luthier, I've always been intrigued with the history of instruments I work with, and in particular, the lives of those who made them.  So often, when we look back at history, I know that I have a tendency to look at just one aspect, but here my aim is to join up the puzzle pieces and have a look at an altogether fascinating picture.

So join me as I wade through tales not only of fame, famine, and war, but also of love, artistic genius, Revolutionary craftsmanship, determination, cunning, and bravery that all have their part to play in the history of the violin. 

Welcome to this episode on the life of Francesco Ruggeri. In previous episodes, we have looked at various families living in Cremona, in particular, the Amati family and their incredible craftsmanship, innovation, and influence on all things violin.

So many of the great makers were influenced by this family, and Ruggeri included. In this show, we will be looking at the life of this maker, Francesco Ruggeri, where he learnt to make instruments, how he fits into the story, and I will talk about something quite innovative Francesco did that today almost everyone will give the credit to Antonio Stradivari for.

Francesco returned to his workshop in San Bernardo after his wedding, and over the years, with his wife, they would have a large family. The very next year, 1653, their first son, Giovanni Battista, was born. The couple would go on to have at least six more children. In these same years, Nicola Amati, newly married, would also have children, and the two families would have known each other well, along with the Guarneri kids and the Gennaro children, all living in the same neighbourhood.

Niccolo Amati was even the godfather to one of Francesco's son,  Giacinto. But in the following years after the weddings of Francesco Ruggeri and Andrea Guarneri, the Amati household has no record of any apprentices living with them, and yet the workshop was producing many instruments. Could Niccolo have had other makers such as Ruggeri and Guarneri working for him still during these years, even though they were no longer living with him?

1. E. Hill and Sons note. And I quote, “The unmistakable handiwork of Francesco Ruggeri can be found in certain of Niccolo Amati's works”. End quote. Francesco Ruggeri, working in his place in San Bernardo, could have been working for Niccolo, but also was building up his own clientele. His instruments definitely went at a cheaper rate to those of the Amatis, and his workmanship was less precise than that of his competitor. But he was able to run a successful business and he found himself experimenting with models and in particular bass instruments. And here is where Ruggeri was doing something a little bit different.

Jason Price. That's probably his most lasting contribution is, uh, are the really excellent cellos that he made, which are of modern usable size.

Linda Lespets

Yes. Because often when people talk about the modern cello, they'll say it's Stradivari. They'll say, oh, he's, he's B model, but, um, but actually he was inspired by Ruggieri. 

Jason Price

You're totally right. You're totally right. I mean, it was all, I'm sure it was all happening sort of organically and without exact, you know, influence and stuff. But, uh, You know, monster basettos that people are making and they work and so he made a lot of them that yeah, Ruggieri figured it out sooner. And a lot of this, you know, has to do, had to do with, um, obviously what clients wanted, that there's a reason why he was making them small because people wanted them. But it also has to do with string technology. And, you know, this is the end of the 17th century is when people first started wrapping strings in metal, the lower strings, and that, that lets you have a, an instrument which is functional at a much smaller body size, and I'm sure that's one of the factors that was going on here that, that led to his making smaller cellos. You could have that lowest string not be, you know, the width of a pencil.  Because, and not super floppy, because you could reinforce it with metal.

Linda Lespets

Now you see, musicians playing on a bass instrument often had to manoeuvre around large bulky basses with wide gut strings. The instrument's response was, Often slow, and so it was difficult to play fast paced compositions and were mostly relegated to simpler bass parts.  But in the last few years, a new technology had changed things. Large gut strings were beginning to be wound with metals which gave them more tension, and this meant that the instrument did not have to be so long and wide. to accommodate the strings that would play the same note. This new string technology is really pivotal in the story of the cello and one of the reasons for its success as an instrument and Ruggeri's renown, and perhaps even his motivation in making this instrument.

I asked Dan Larson from Gamut Strings about the history of strings and why they are so important in determining the size and playability of an instrument. 

My name is Dan Larson  and I run a business called Gamut Music Incorporated. And I'm a trained violin maker. I also make Baroque guitars and lutes of the Baroque and the Renaissance variety, and I have a workshop in Duluth, Minnesota that makes musical strings, or gut strings, for musical instruments.

The 17th century actually is a very exciting time for many, many things. There was a burgeoning market for everything at that time.  There was a lot of technology being brought to the world in many ways, and there was a lot of people beginning to experiment with things. And that was back in the day when a guy could get an idea, and he could make something, he could invent something, and he could, uh, recognize a new, law of nature, and  that's just what educated people did back in those days in the 17th century.

Up until  the mid 17th century, when you had strings, You had only one choice of string material, and that was gut. There was, sheep gut was used, there was beef gut that was used, there were some other,  allegedly, some different animals that were used for gut. But primarily it was sheep gut, and secondarily it was beef gut. Those were the two primary materials that were used. Largely because that was the material that was available. People at that time ate a lot of sheep.  And not so many cattle, but they had a certain number of cattle that they had with slaughter for various reasons. So, the only choice that they had for strings was gut. String making in itself was a whole industry and in 1656, just a few years after Ruggeri married, Paris had its first guild of Boyadieu. That's the French word for gut string makers. Their workshops were near the slaughterhouse in the Faubourg Saint Martin.

Dan Larson.

What were the main, uh, places that strings came from?

Were, there sort of string making centres or did people make strings everywhere? Would musicians make their own strings? 

No, they wouldn't.  It was too complicated a system and the material was very carefully controlled by the people that made strings. Strings tended to be made in centres.  And they were geographical areas were, were primarily designated as certain areas where strings were made. And, and it was usually in large population areas where a lot of animals were killed because the, the animals would be the source of the material to make the strings.  So, he ended up with a lot of string making in Paris, for instance, uh, Lyon. There was an enormous and tremendous development of string making in Markneukirchen in Germany, in the Saxon region there. And they, had an international industry where they would gather gut from all over the eastern Europe and bring it into the city to be processed into gut. The gut string making was an international business. It was an international concern. The transporting of the material was very specialized, so it wouldn't, uh, it wouldn't go bad in transit. And preserving it was a very specific thing that had, they had to develop different ways of carrying it to preserve it, so it wouldn't go bad.

And how, sorry, how did they do, how did they do it? How did they carry it without it going off?  Uh, they made these special boxes.  And, uh, they were just big thick boxes that would protect the, the strings from not, not only the cull, but from animals because the, the little critters like to get into it. I think the biggest, the biggest threat to transporting gut was the, was the critters that would want to get into it. A lot more than the cold and thing, but it was usually, they were usually transmitted dry. Right. Okay. So they were transported dry. So they would, in the source where they were taken, the gut would have been dried out and then put in these containers and the containers were, I don't know if they were just particularly heavy or they were reinforced with metal or something, but they would, they would be very heavy.

Okay. uh, specifically made to resist the influence of the, of the animals that wanted to get in and eat the gut. Right, right.  There's also different traditions. The German tradition is very different than the, the Italian tradition, which is very different than the French tradition. And the French and the, and the Italians tended to use more fresh gut, where they would take the, the gut from the animal and turn it into a string pretty much immediately. The Germans had this process of drying the gut so they could transport the gut over great distances, and then they could also make the gut into strings at their leisure,  which was, uh, just suited them better. Right.  It was, uh, an international industry.  It was a very sophisticated industry, as it continues to be even today. And it varied from one country to another. Every, each country had their own particular ways of going about it and, and therefore the result of the different strings had, uh, different reputations. You know, the, strings from Italy had a reputation. for really good top strings, and the French had a really good reputation for lower strings, and the Germans had a really good reputation for inexpensive strings, and you know, just everybody had their own little niche that they worked into the market.

If you were a string maker, where did that put you in, uh, was that a sort of a sort of a lower  class thing or were you a proud craftsman? Do you know what their position in society would have been? 

Oh, the, the string makers were the richest men in town. They were quite prosperous in Markneukirchen and literally the richest people in town were the people that owned the string making factories.

Emily Brayshaw

It's really interesting that you talk about this idea of the wire wrapped around the gut to make strings because that has long been, by this time, a technique that is used  Um, in textile production, in that you would have like a thread and literally wind gold or silver wire around it. And that's how you get gold and silver embroidery thread.

And um, depending on the thickness of that, you can get like Super fine for embroidery or you, and, and weaving, or you can perhaps get thicker for fringing and things like that. Part of me wonders, and maybe somebody out there will have the answer, whether, you know, these textile techniques influenced this technique of string making.

Was that everywhere that we're using this around? Everywhere. Everywhere.

Yeah. Yeah. So you had this mixing of technologies and Cremona is a city, you know, bursting with textiles. Yeah, it could well be. I mean, it, there's so much overlap and, you know, we remember, remember as well, like it's a small place. It's by the end of the plague, it's 17, 000 people. Everybody has to know everybody else.  You know, everybody knows everybody else. Mm right. That's kind of how these places work. So you do get these kind of pots of ideas too, you know, that that are happening. And I think this is really sort of a fascinating thing,

Dan Larsen

So the only choice that they had for strings was gut.  That works well if you have an instrument that has only one string. It works really, really well. When you have an instrument that has more than one string, you have to start playing around with the design of the string, because you have strings that have to have different pitches. So, you have to figure out how to get the different pitches. And more importantly, you have to figure out what size the instrument needs to be to get the pitches of the playing gut strings to work as efficiently as possible. And they developed some science around that. There were various people that were instrumental.

Mersenne, for instance, developed a series of laws about  gut strings and how it should work and how the strings should be calculated so they would have this the same amount of tension based on a given length. You could have a six stringed instrument and all the strings would have the same amount of tension, but they would be at the different pitches that they were supposed to be. So he developed a whole A whole system of laws and rules,  uh, to govern those things. Uh, Galileo's father was very much into figuring out strings, and in fact, Galileo's, one of his first experiences in science was to help his dad make strings. tests the strings. He had this sort of setup where they would hang a hook on a string and then hang a weight on it and then change the lengths and they would figure out what the pitch of the string would be given different weights on it and different masses and different, uh, tensions and so forth. So there was a lot of that going on. They were trying to figure out how strings worked and how they could bring the design  into it. That works all right. It works fine. But it does mean that you end up with some, with some very thick strings on the bottom, because the instrument has to be, it has to be scaled such that you can get the first string up to the pitch that you want the first string to be. So it's really the first string of the instrument that dictates the size of the instrument, and that's why we get You know, that's why the violin is the size of a violin, isn't it, the size of a cello is the size of a cello is, and so on and so forth.

It is also around this time that the first references to The gut strings were generally wrapped in silver, but also in copper and brass. Thanks to these strings, makers such as Rugeri could make smaller cellos for musicians, and that was just what he did. Not only could you buy yourself a more manoeuvrable instrument, but composers, especially such places as Bologna and Naples, had composers writing music for the cello.

Jason Price.

I made a, a nickel harper once, which is like a Swedish violin. Cool. Often people will put cello strings on them. And that's when you see that it's not ideal. Like really the, uh, Savarez, you could say, I want this length and I want this note for this length and they make the perfect string and it sounded so much better.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. It is funny to think of what this. You know, string industry looked like in the, in the 17th century. I mean, obviously you didn't just go on Amazon and get some strings delivered to your house.  You know, you probably, I'm sure it was butchers out the front door and then fishing line and violin strings out the back.

Yeah. It's kind of funny. And in your, an article you wrote that's in the, I was, I'm going to say Cossio Archive, but that's not right. It's the Tarizio. You were talking about, uh, composers in the second half of the 1600s. There were people actually writing specifically for cello. Yeah. That's really when the cello became, uh, considered as a solo instrument at the end of that 17th century and early 18th century. And that's when you see Gabrielli start writing for these really, like, complicated, uh,  lines for solo cello, and then obviously Boccherini did it. 30, 40 years later. And, um, yeah, that's obviously the makers had to, had to step up their game and make instruments that could handle that for sure. Yeah. It's like, I feel like it's a chicken or the egg.

I'm like, Oh, they're writing for solo cello. And yes. And is that because then they did, they make smaller violin cellos or  they discovered that they have these smaller good sound like cellos that were responsive. Cause they have to be.  Quite responsive to write more virtuously music for. Yeah, absolutely. A chicken and egg, but like a four part chicken and egg with like musician, composer, instruments, string. Um,  I imagine there were a lot of factors that were sort of, yeah, all coming together and, and, uh, it didn't all happen at once, but that's, that's the period in which. In which cellos became smaller because musicians wanted them to be smaller.

Dan Larsen.

The instrument has to be, it has to be scaled such that you can get the first string up to the pitch that you want the first string to be. So it's really the first string of the instrument that dictates the size of the instrument. You know, that's why the violin is the size of the violin, as in the size of the cello is, and so on and so forth. And then when you have the, when you have established the string length based on the pitch of the top string, then you have to figure out what the other strings are going to be, because theoretically you should change the length of those, like on a harpsichord. You can use, you could use the same diameter of string, the same type of string, just make it longer, and you would get the different pitches, and it would It would sound good and it would work well, but on a fixed length instrument like a violin or a cello, you can't do that. You can't have multiple lengths of strings. So they had to develop a system that became known as foreshortening. So they would change the mass of the string. Which would allow them to put, make the string shorter, and maintain the tension that the instrument needed to be, the string needed to have on it to sound properly. Because they had only one material, the only thing they could do was to add more gut and make the strings thicker.  to add mass to the string for the lower strings to get the tension that they required on it. And that, that works fine. They, there were different types of strings that they developed with, with different twisting technologies that would, uh, the string would be flexible enough to, to play at those relatively low tensions at the, the thicknesses that they were, that they needed and so forth. But, the end result wasn't 100 percent satisfactory for them.

Sorry, are you saying that, um, so for Andrea Amati, for example, when he made his violin, which is sort of what we go on today, he, he had to already have had the strings were already like developed and he made it, he had to make it so that it could accommodate those strings.

Exactly. Yeah. Ah, so the strings come before the violin.  Oh, the strings come before the violin, yeah. The strings come before everything. Do you think he would have, um, used, they would have used, say, lute strings? Would they have been the best strings then? Like, if you were a maker in the 16th century, what would you have taken?

I think the string makers at the time were making strings for everything. The violin was a very popular instrument. Okay. And there were string makers that made strings specifically for the violin, and I think that most of the string shops probably made strings for lutes and strings for violins. Some, some of the string gauges would double over and be useful on, on, on both, but not so many because the violin had tended to have a lot more tension than the lute does.

Yeah. And would he have gone and said, I'm making an instrument this size, can you make me a string to fit it? And the string makers would have gone, okay, yeah, all right. 

Sure, sure. And they would have had standard sizes that they were using. Okay. You know, he would just say, I need, I need, uh, you know, five violin E strings and six A strings and two D strings and, and 18 G strings.

And that's, they would have said, okay, but that's what we'll get for you. So anyway, the, concept of the fact that there was only one string material is really important in understanding the development of the instruments and the size, especially the sizing of the instruments. Uh, that's, really important to understand that they were limited by this material. And on the other hand, they were sort of fortunate enough to have only one material. It made things a little simpler in many ways. You know, there weren't that many options for sizing. If they were sticking to that one principle of the, well, in the lute world, when they talked about tuning an instrument, they would say, tune the top string to the point where just before it breaks, which is always a  fun thing to know. If it breaks, okay, you went a little bit too far. You shouldn't have gone that far. It's like trying to prove a negative. You can't always do that so easily. The violin strings tended to be bigger and heavier anyway, so they probably didn't have so much of a problem with that. But in the 17th century, in the mid 1600s, something happened, and we don't know exactly where. I suspect it happened in France. There was a popular book written by John Playford. It came out in 1664 with the addition that has this article that specifies a new type of string that was available for violins. It says specifically that it has silver wire and the wire was twisted or gimped onto silk or gut to make this string and this string was specifically used for the violin G string. And of course, this string is, has marvellous properties and is the most wonderful string ever invented by man and so forth, as, as most salesmen would say. And, uh. The best string in the world. In a good unregulated market, you know. 

I love how, um, a lot of some string brands will like have these claims for it being the best, you know, the best E string in the world. Oh, sure. That one's actually made in Australia. I have the packet. I have the best E string in the world.  Yes. From about, it's about 100 years old.

Yeah, they're, they're, well, I guess if you stop and think about it, if you, if you're not going to make something the best in the world, why do you even bother?

What's the point?

You never, no one ever says, this is the best. Third, but maybe, maybe fourth, the third or fourth best thing in the world. You know, it never happens that way. There was this new type of string that came available that was advertised in 1664. So that indicates to me that this technology had been developing for quite some time before that. Nothing ever comes out. Nobody ever invents something and then advertises it the next day. That's just not the way things work. So probably by the 1630s or 1640s there was this experimentation of combining the wire With and with the string material.

This brings us to the end of this second episode of Francesco Rugeri, a man who lived with the times embracing new technologies and innovating his instrument. Cello players everywhere can be a little bit thankful to him and his influence on other makers in perfecting this instrument.  That incredible cello playing you've heard throughout the episode is by Timo Viekko Valve from the Australian Chamber Orchestra, playing on his wonderful Amati Brothers cello made in 1616.

If you would like to hear the fascinating sound Story of his cello and the man who made it. You can go back and listen to episodes nine and 10 about the Ammar Brothers and this cello in particular,  but the story of Ruggeri is not over for now. I'll say goodbye and I hope you will join me for the next episode of the Violin Chronicles.

 

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