This episode originally aired on This Is Love.

There’s a town in northern Italy that’s home to the most famous violin makers in history. The museum there holds some of the most unique and prized violins in the world - but we’re in danger of losing their sounds forever. In this episode from the podcast “This Is Love”, Phoebe Judge reports on how a town stayed quiet to preserve an instrument they love.

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Illa Villardo by Blue Dot Sessions

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View Transcript ▶︎

You're listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

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There’s a town in northern Italy named Cremona. I’ve been there. It’s not your typical Italian tourist destination, but it still has all of the Italian charm. But more than anything, this town is known for being home to some of the most renowned violin makers in history, including the legendary Antonio Stradivari.

The people of Cremona are clearly proud of their city’s connection to the violin. It’s why they’ve gone to great lengths to preserve both the history and sound of the instrument they’re known for.

The podcast, This is Love, captured the entire feel and heart of this town perfectly… and I’m excited to share their story now. Here’s host Phoebe Judge.

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Phoebe: What does a violin sound like?

Paolo: What do violins sound like? They sound like a violin. There's something special in the way that sort of penetrates in your body and gets to your soul. It's very emotional. It's very emotional.

Phoebe: There's a wooden chamber that sits in the middle of a large room, a room in the middle of a noisy building in the middle of a city. There seems to be an understanding that this room has something special inside. People wait their turns quietly to go in. When you enter the chamber, it's empty and pitch black, but then it fills with this music.

Phoebe: Outside of the chamber, violins are everywhere. Real violins, pictures of violins, pieces of violins. The people here protect some of the most precious instruments in the world, instruments made hundreds of years ago carved by hand by the world's earliest violin makers, and they did it here in a city in Northern Italy, Cremona.

Virginia: Cremona, I mean, everyone knows is the place where the story of violin making began.

Phoebe: This is Virginia Villa.

Virginia: I think violin makers are very happy persons. You can concentrate in every part of your work. And then at the end, after a little piece of wood, you listen.

Phoebe: The violin we have today was born from a collaboration between instrument makers and musicians. Violin makers would modify their design based on what musicians needed and what sounds they wanted to make.

Paolo: The people here started to look at musical instruments and decided to improve them because they were a musician that wanted to have better music. So from this combination, most likely, the violin came to life.

Phoebe: Paolo Bodini works with Virginia Villa here at Cremona's violin museum. He's also a doctor, and he's also the former mayor of Cremona. Like most of the people in town, he's very interested in violins and how they were created here almost 500 years ago.

Paolo: The first family, the first makers were in Cremona. The violin became all of a sudden sort of a revolutionary instrument. It was so powerful that everybody wanted to have a violin.

Phoebe: The world's most famous violin maker, Antonio Stradivari, established his workshop here. Stradivari wanted to make his instruments expressive and loud. Earlier violins were made to be played in quiet performances in homes. He wanted the instrument to be heard, so he kept changing the dimensions of his violin. One curator once said all his life, he was searching for the ideal shape. He kept searching until he died in 1737. He made over 1000 violins, violas, and cellos.

Phoebe: Even if we could replicate their shape exactly, we couldn't make a violin like a Stradivarius today. There's nothing like it. There are lots of theories about why his violins sound different than what we make today. One theory is that we don't have wood like that anymore. Researchers have speculated that particularly cold winters and cool summers in the 17th century meant trees grew more slowly. Their wood was dense in a way that we haven't seen since. Another theory is that Stradivari gathered his wood from ancient churches.

Paolo: There is a magic attraction to these ancient objects, and probably the seasoning of the wood itself and the time that goes by [inaudible 00:04:39] change is sound and makes it more round, more mature, more interesting.

Phoebe: And each violin is different. They have their own character, their own difficulties. One musician said it doesn't always do exactly what you want. It's said that the sound the violin produces is the closest thing to the human voice. And like the human voice, a violin gets tired. The instruments in Cremona are getting older. They're fragile. Their distinctive sounds are changing. Museum curator, Fausto Cacciatori, says it's part of their life cycle. After they reach a certain age, they become too fragile to be played and they go to sleep.

Phoebe: Can the sound of an instrument be lost? Can it get so delicate that you can't anymore play it?

Paolo: Well, [inaudible 00:05:37] becomes too fragile to be played. When you put friction on these things, you put a lot of stress on the violin, especially nowadays with this type of ... and depending from the music you're playing, of course. There is a point where it's better to stop playing it because it can break.

Phoebe: Some of the violins could become too delicate to play in our lifetime and when people in Cremona heard that they may never hear these instruments again, they decided to do something about it. They asked everyone to be quiet.

Phoebe: There's a place on a Norwegian Island in the Arctic where there's a vault tucked into the side of a mountain where people are collecting seeds, seeds from all kinds of plants from 243 countries. They're kept and protected just in case the worst happens so that we won't lose the plants forever. It's been referred to as Noah's Ark. This museum in Cremona is trying to do the same thing. They're collecting the sounds of these ancient instruments so that we always have them. They call it the sound bank.

Paolo: Single notes, single notes played in all the different variants that you can have, piano, pianissimo forte, vibrato and so on. You have to record notes by notes on all the different various instruments. And then people go to this sound bank and can compose music, picking up single notes and put them together in their computer. So the idea of this special sound bank, what to do it with ancient instruments, this was the sparks of the city.

Phoebe: They chose four instruments from the museum's collection, two violins from 1727 and 1734, a viola from 1614 and a cello from 1700. The idea for the sound bank was proposed by two young sound engineers from the next town over, Matea Bersani and Leonardo Tedeschi. Here's Leo.

Leo: We thought that me and Matea are two DJs. We are not fancy dressed or stuff like that. And so we thought that if we went there, me and him, probably they will have to push a button to call the security.

Phoebe: But they convinced Paolo that the project was worth all the effort it might take, and Paolo convinced the museum. To get started, they made some test recordings in the auditorium in the museum. The auditorium is incredibly beautiful, all curved wood. It feels like you're actually sitting inside a violin. They set up highly sensitive microphones, turn them on and then they notice something.

Leo: We found out that we can hear a lot of car engine rumbles and a lot of other different kinds of noise because the auditorium where we make all the recording, it doesn't have any soundproof door that cover the outside part, and so we had to find some solution.

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The team had to figure out a way to isolate the auditorium from the city sounds around it. It’s a similar situation to when you have a noisy neighbor while you’re trying to work. The obvious answer in that case is to politely ask them to be quiet. But can you do that with a whole city? We’ll find out, after the break.

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MIDROLL

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Cremona’s violin museum wanted to preserve the sound of some famous instruments before they were lost forever. To do it properly though, they needed highly sensitive microphones that could capture every nuance of the instrument. The only problem was, the microphones were so sensitive that they captured the city life outside as well. Here’s Phoebe again.

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Phoebe: The museum is in the middle of the city. People live all around it. There are cafes and restaurants and businesses, people rolling suitcases, walking in high heels, shouting and laughing and honking their horns. It's loud. People are living their lives. It wasn't going to be possible to make nice recordings with so much background noise, so the museum and the engineers did the only thing they could think of. They asked the people of Cremona to stop and to be quiet for the sake of the violins. If this was going to work, they need the mayor's help.

Leo: That was the most difficult part because in Italy, bureaucracy is not that fast.

Phoebe: But the mayor was onboard. He loves the old violins, too. He closed the streets. A notice was placed in the newspaper and letters were mailed. The request was simple. Please be quiet.

Leo :You could breathe. You could walk around and be bouncing on your heels and so on, but I mean, living their normal life, trying not to make loud noises.

Phoebe: They unscrewed the light bulbs so you wouldn't hear the faintest electric buzz coming from them. They stopped the elevators. They turned off the ventilation in the auditorium. Silence. The museum's curator put on gloves and handed the instrument to the musician in the now dim auditorium, and then they began.

Paolo: Each note can be short or too long, can be a loud or soft, piano, pianissimo, vibrato and so on. All these different variation were recorded for each note, for the entire extension of the instruments. We decided to use young musician because it was a very heavy work. They worked for hours trying to looking for the perfect note, so to say. They work for 10 hours a day, two shifts. So each musician was working four to five hours of recording.

Phoebe: Note after note after note, they did this for five weeks and for five weeks, Cremona kept quiet for the most part. We stopped at a cafe right outside of the auditorium and spoke with the barista behind the counter.

Phoebe: What did it mean? Did it mean that you had to move more slowly?

Barista: Slowly, yes, no loud voice. Very, very, very little voice. A very had thing for me. Very hard thing, yes. In a bar, there's a lot of sounds.

Phoebe: Do you think more about noise now? Because you had to be quiet for so long, do you think more about noise?

Barista: Yes. Yes. Really, yes. Yes.

Leo: A lot of the people respected our project and some of them were happy to be quiet. That for Italian is pretty odd.

Phoebe: Did you ever walk outside one day during a break in the recording and just stand in the middle of that square and listen to how quiet everything was?

Leo: Yeah. Actually, the silence is very odd to reach, but you can feel the willing of the people and you can see the willing of the people on doing less noise. So we are noisy people. I used to speak very loudly in all the occasion even if I am in a place that I cannot, because I have these in my DNA, so it was very fun to see Italian people try to be quiet.

Phoebe: Leo says he once had to break up two teenagers kissing and laughing outside of the auditorium. He says he felt kind of bad about that one, but the teenagers moved along quietly. People were trying. The garbage trucks started coming at night instead of during the day. One man turned off his motorcycle when he got near the area and walked with it the rest of the way. There is a security guard posted outside of the auditorium. His job was to remind people to be quiet and he worked very long shifts outside in January. The neighbors would see him standing out there and bring him cups of tea.

Neighbor: Where are you from?

Phoebe: America.

Neighbor: Ah, yes. I heard that you were speaking English, British English, American English. It does matter. So I wanted to wish you a good to stay in Cremona.

Phoebe: Thank you very much. Are you from Cremona?

Neighbor: Yes, I live here. I live just on the corner.

Phoebe: What did you think when you heard that you'd have to be quiet for a month?

Neighbor: I didn't mind. Violins are very, very, very important. I like the violin very fond of music.

Phoebe: Were you careful when you were walking around to be very quiet?

Neighbor: Yes. Yes. I care. I care. I like silence. I like silence.

Phoebe: Even with everyone's participation, the recordings took a very long time. They had to pause a lot because there still was some background noise. They couldn't freeze the city.

Leo: We had some unexpected noises like flights, like ambulance, like police. And so outside, we had to find some solution and not always there was a clear way to solve the problem, but we all adapted. Obviously we have to break the recording a lot of time, but we had enough time to record everything, and this is the only thanks to the people and to the workers of the area because if they didn't do less noise, we had to stop every five, six seconds for some noises and it is impossible for a musician to be focused on a job that every six second someone say to you, "Please, we need to stop. Redo it, redo it, redo it, redo it." And so we were able to do it.

Phoebe: Would you find yourself, even if you didn't need to be, would you find yourself whispering?

Leo: Yeah, a lot of times. And we were always tense about doing noises, and so I had to train myself a lot to do this, because as I said before, I am a very, very loud person and we are nightlife DJs with playing in clubs. We scream, we dance. That's our attitude usually.

Phoebe: After five weeks, it was done. They had the recordings they needed, and when you listen in a way, you can also hear the people of Cremona working together.

Leo: The power of this instrumental is mystical. When I heard the first recording I was hearing not from only from the headphones and stuff, but sometimes I take out the headphones and I wanted to feel the violin inside the room and not from the recorder. And this is something that is physical. The sound, we tend to forget that is something that is physical. We cannot see, but when you see a speaker, there is sound inside, that is wave form that is coming out from the speaker and go to your body. The sensation of the body when you can feel some kind of music are amazing and that are huge in that the context of hearing this little instrumental playing that powerful.

Phoebe: Leo says he still gets chills each time he listens to someone play. Every day at lunch, the people of Cremona are invited to come listen to a concert. At 12:00, one of these ancient instruments is removed from its display and taken by guard into the auditorium. Performers come from all over the world for the chance to play them. On the day we were there, the auditorium was filled with children on a school trip.

Phoebe: The violinist performed a variety of pieces showing us the full range of the instrument. She described why she loved playing each piece. She joked with the school kids. The concert only lasted half an hour, but it was clear she wouldn't have minded if it went on and on.

Lana: My name is Lana Yokoyama. I come from Osaka, Japan, and I've been living here in Cremona for 12 years. I started playing the violin when I was seven years old. At the beginning, I simply studied the violin as an instrument. Then, I began to feel it as a part of my body and since I began to feel this unity, it has become just as if I was expressing myself directly. It is the easiest way to express my emotions because music is a language which reaches directly into the heart.

Phoebe: After the performance, the guard takes the instrument back to its glass case, where once again, all we can do is look at it and listen to it when we can until it's time for it to go to sleep.

CREDITS

This story came from the wonderful podcast, This Is Love. Be sure to show them some love by subscribing in your favorite podcast player. Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. Find out more at defacto sound dot com.

This story was produced by Nadia Wilson, Lauren Spohrer and Phoebe Judge for the podcast, This is Love. Audio Mix by Johnny Vince Evans and Rob Byers. The show explores love in all kinds of unexpected forms -- check it out at thisislovepodcast.com.

You can find us on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit. You can also see what’s happening behind the scenes by following Defacto Sound on Instagram.

Thanks for listening.

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