Stewart Pollens

Trained as a violin and keyboard-instrument maker,[1] Stewart Pollens (born in New York, 1949) served as the Conservator of Musical Instruments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1976–2006. His work there included the restoration and maintenance of the museum's encyclopedic collection of over 5,000 instruments, as well as research, writing, and lecturing on the collection.

After leaving the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Pollens formed Violin Advisor, LLC, a consulting firm that advises purchasers of fine violins.[2] He continues to conduct research and write on the subject of musical instruments, including an article published in the May 2009 issue of The Strad on a scientific analysis of Stradivari's instrument varnish.[3] Pollens is frequently interviewed by publications that most recently include The New York Times[4] and Slate.[5]

In addition to his work at Violin Advisor, Stewart Pollens restores stringed and early keyboard instruments for private collectors and museums (including an early New York piano for the Merchant's House Museum and an English bentside spinet for the Van Cortland House). He has done keyboard restoration and recording preparation work for Leonard Bernstein, Paul Badura-Skoda, John Browning, Mieczyslaw Horszowski, Byron Janis, Igor Kipnis, and many others. Among the unusual instruments he has restored are an accordion once owned by Alice "In Wonderland" P. Liddell and a tambourine painted by Toulouse-Lautrec.

His book Stradivari was published in February 2010 by Cambridge University Press and includes new biographical information and detailed analyses of Stradivari's workshop materials preserved in the Museo Stradivariano in Cremona. Pollens's seminal work on the history of the piano, The Early Pianoforte (Cambridge University Press), was republished in paperback in 2009. In preparation are The Manual of Musical Instrument Conservation and Bartolomeo Cristofori: Keyboard Instrument Maker, both to be published by Cambridge University Press.

Stewart Pollens is married to the concert violinist Stephanie Chase.

Publications and activities

Stewart Pollens has written extensively on stringed and early keyboard instruments, including The Violin Forms of Antonio Stradivari (London, 1992), The Early Pianoforte (Cambridge, 1995), Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù (London, 1998), François-Xavier Tourte: Bow Maker (New York, 2001), and The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar (Cambridge, 2003). He is a contributor to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and writes on a regular basis for The Strad.

Mr. Pollens's book The Violin Forms of Antonio Stradivari has been hailed as "the standard work on the evolution of Stradivarius's designs."[6] This book contains life-size photographs of all of the extant wood forms and patterns used by Stradivari in the construction of his violins, violas, and cellos, and includes an analysis of their geometry.

In The Early Pianoforte, Pollens traces the history of the piano back to 1440, nearly three-hundred years before the work of Bartolomeo Cristofori, the harpsichord maker who is generally credited with having invented the piano in Florence around 1700. This book examines the work of numerous makers, including Henri Arnaut de Zwolle, Bartolomeo Cristofori, Giovanni Ferrini, Domenico del Mela, Henrique Van Casteel, Joachim José Antunes, Francisco Pérez Mirabal, Gottfried Silbermann, and Christian Ernst Friederici.[7]

In François-Xavier Tourte: Bow Maker, Stewart Pollens and co-author Henryk Kaston provide a technical description of Francois Tourte's working methods and reveal new biographical facts based upon previously unpublished documents discovered in French archives.

Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù features 200 life-size color photographs taken by Pollens and complete technical documentation of the twenty-five Guarneri violins that were displayed in the “Masterpieces of Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù” exhibition held at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1994. Containing newly discovered biographical and historical information, this is the most thorough study to date of this great maker and his work. Stewart Pollens contributed the chapter on dendrochronology, a scientific procedure used to determine the age of the wood used in making violins.

In 1999, Stewart Pollens challenged the authenticity of the world's most famous violin, the Ashmolean Museum's Messiah Stradivarius, in a series of articles published in the Journal of the Violin Society of America. The controversy initiated by these articles and presentations at the Violin Society of America and the American Federation of Violin Makers was widely reported in major newspapers and magazines throughout the world.[8]

Awards and profiles

Bibliography

Books

Articles

See also

References

  1. ↑ In the 1970s, Pollens apprenticed with harpsichord builder John Challis and studied violinmaking with Mittenwald faculty.
  2. ↑ "The Talk of the Town," The New Yorker, November 24, 2008
  3. ↑ "Recipe for Success," The Strad vol. 120, no. 1429 (May, 2009): 34-38.
  4. ↑ "What Exalts Stradivarius? Not Varnish, Study Says": The New York Times, December 4, 2009
  5. ↑ "Why Cellos Sound Lousy in Bad Weather," Slate, January 26, 2009
  6. ↑ Giles Whittell, The Times, October 27, 2000
  7. ↑ In 1997, Pollens received the American Musical Instrument Society's Nicholas Bessaraboff Prize for this Cambridge University Press publication.
  8. ↑ These include The Wall Street Journal (March 11, 1999), The Times (London) (March 15, 1999; October 27, 2000; November 11, 2001; November 26, 2001), Le Figaro (December 7, 2000), La Stampa (March 28, 1999), The Strad (August, 2001), Attache (September, 1999), Money (June, 2002), Forbes.com (April 22, 2002) and Metropulse.com (February 17, 2001).

External links