The Strads of Montclair

For 200 years, the stringed instruments of the orchestra have changed hardly at all--and many musicians think they should. If there were more instruments in the family, they argue, with fewer gaps in range, modern composers might be tempted to write more music for strings.

Last week a plump Montclair, N.J., housewife was working hard at closing the string gap: aided by a Guggenheim grant, Carleen Maley Hutchins was devising the members of a new family of seven stringed instruments--including a vertical viola.

Beyond Belief. At 51, Mrs. Hutchins is a widely respected maker of violas and occasional cellos and violins (she makes violins "only when there isn't enough wood left to make a viola"). When the Boston Symphony's Eugene Lehner wants a viola, he goes straight to Montclair (where Mrs. Hutchins sells them for $600 apiece); the Budapest String Quartet's Mischa Schneider has used one of her cellos. Says one satisfied Hutchins customer, David Mankovitz, who played with the Kroll Quartet: "Her viola creates a sensation wherever I play it. People want to know how to get that tone quality. At the Spoleto Festival, they wouldn't believe it." Mrs. Hutchins' new instruments, some of which have already been played, are even more unbelievable: they run a wide gamut of tones--from an octave higher than the violin to the lowest tones of the present bass viol--and they do so with equal timbre and loudness each step of the way. Only an instrument maker with Mrs. Hutchins' combination of craftsmanship and science could have made them.

Good Carpenter. Violas started emerging from the Hutchins' living room about 15 years ago. Mrs. Hutchins, who was teaching science at the Brearley School in Manhattan, started studying the viola and discarded a store-bought model to try to make her own from blueprints. Although a Steinway violinmaker pronounced her first effort the work of "a good carpenter," she went ahead with No. 2, soon began turning out instruments that were good enough to sell. Nowadays, she tries to use the same woods Stradivarius used; she gets spruce and curly maple from the mountains of Czech been seasoning since World War I, and Lombardy poplar from the crates used to ship Chianti bottles from Italy. Toughest wood of all to find is the seasoned willow that Stradivarius used for blocks to strengthen the corners and ends of his violins; Mrs. Hutchins now gets it from polo balls and broken cricket bats, sent to her by friends in England.

Most of the Hutchins products are finished in the kitchen of a brown stucco house in which violins, violas and cellos are piled under tables, filed away in secretaries, and hang from curtain rods and moldings. Mrs. Hutchins tests her newly devised instruments in a basement lab full of measuring equipment that she mastered only after several years of electronics study. The biggest of her new in struments, the large bass, and the small est, the treble, are still causing trouble. It would take a seven-foot man to play the large bass unless she can somehow alter its proportions while retaining the tone; only a midget could play the treble. "At the moment," says Mrs. Hutchins, "we're up against the human physique."

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