Take it literally

Editorial comment for music B2B mag MMR Global

A UK violin maker has made a new instrument to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Wuthering Heights author Emily Bronte, using wood from a tree which grew close to where she wrote.

You can't beat having a fiddle in the fresh air                           

Steve Burnett said he thinks the sycamore, which was felled close to the Bronte Parsonage, in Haworth, West Yorkshire, may have been old enough to have been there during Bronte’s life.

He spent around three months making the Emily Bronte Violin and said in Haworth that “in an artistic sense, it has come back to the moors”.

He said a musical instrument can be seen as an extension of the literary world.

“As Goethe said, ‘music begins where words end’,” Burnett said.

“What I do is give voice to the environment.”

Which may or may not be so much unadulterated guff, accompanied by pics of him looking suitably “windswept and interesting” as Billy Connolly would no doubt describe him.

But I think it’s the sort of snake oil we need more of in the MI business. When you can’t actually do anything significantly new with the design and function of a violin or most other instruments how else are you going to innovate and give dealers something to hang a sale on?

There are plenty of other industries that function pretty well off some very shaky science (shampoo anyone?), needless anniversaries (stamp, mug or coin anyone?) and other strokes. We’re not bad at making up new colours and slapping on signatures but I think we could push the envelope a little further with this stuff. 

Will it mean much to real musicians? Probably not. But a sale is a sale. And that, more than anything else is what the industry needs right now. 

George Bernard Shure 150th anniversary mic, anyone?