Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader (62 page)

What happened to that recording of “Po' Lazarus” is another story: It was preserved in a music archive, and in 2000 it ended up in the soundtrack of the film
O Brother, Where Art Thou
. The soundtrack was an even bigger hit than the movie: It went on to sell more than five million copies, generating thousands of dollars in royalties for Carter…if anyone could find him, that is: after more than 40 years, nobody knew whether he was even still alive.

It took the record's producer about a year to track Carter down in Chicago. One day two people showed up at his doorstep, told him about the movie (he'd never seen it) and the soundtrack (he'd never heard it), and handed him a check for $20,000, the first of what would likely be hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties.

THE AFTERMATH:
About a week later, Carter flew to the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles, where he saw the album win five Grammies, including Album of the Year. For all that, Carter has trouble remembering the lyrics to the song that made him an instant celebrity. “I sang that song a long time back,” he says.

THE STAR:
Patrick Singleton, the only athlete representing Bermuda in the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City

THE HEADLINE:
Athlete Comes Up Short(s) in Salt Lake

WHAT HAPPENED:
Did you watch the opening ceremony for the 2002 Winter Olympics? If you did, maybe you saw it: In the sea of athletes who participated in the ceremony, all properly outfitted for the bitter cold, Singleton wore shorts. Bright red shorts.
Bermuda
shorts—the one thing (other than the Bermuda Triangle) that the tiny British colony is known for.

Even before the Olympics were over, Switzerland's Olympic Museum (where the International Olympic Committee is headquartered) contacted Singleton to see if he would be willing to donate his outfit to the museum. “I doubt we will ever see again an athlete walk into the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics wearing shorts,” a museum spokesperson told reporters. “Everyone will remember, because it was so cold!”

THE AFTERMATH:
Singleton was glad to hand them over. But how'd he do in the Olympics? Not so good—he came in 37th out of 50 in the men's singles luge. Had he worn pants to the opening, he would've been quickly forgotten. But now his legacy—or at least his shorts—will be preserved forever.

THE STAR:
Andrea Noceti, representing Colombia in the Miss Universe pageant in 2001

THE HEADLINE:
Ay Colombia! Beauty Queen Puts Letterman in His Place

WHAT HAPPENED:
In May 2001, Noceti participated in the Miss Universe contest and was eliminated in the first round. That might have been it as far as her fame was concerned, had David Letterman not joked a few days later that she competed in the talent competition by “swallowing 50 balloons full of heroin,” a reference to the country's troubled past as a haven for drug smugglers.

Outraged by the comment, Noceti (and the Colombian ambassador and consul general) threatened to sue. As Letterman watched helplessly, his simple one-liner mushroomed into an international incident. He quickly invited the beauty queen to come on his show so that he could apologize to her in person.

THE AFTERMATH:
Do you remember who won the Miss Universe pageant in 2001? Winners of beauty pageants are fogotten almost as quickly as the losers. But Noceti's dispute with Letterman was covered all over the world, and millions of viewers—probably more than watched the pageant—tuned in to watch Letterman apologize. He did so effusively and then invited her to sing on the show. She reciprocated the gesture by giving Letterman an autographed picture of Colombian coffee pitchman Juan Valdez and a book about her hometown.

“You joke about what you shouldn't joke about,” she said to Letterman, “but you're a nice man.” And then her 15 minutes of fame were up.

“According to a new study reported in
USA Today
, three out of four people make up 75% of the population.”

—
David Letterman

The violins made by Antonio Stradivari are considered by many to be the most perfect instruments ever made. Here's the story of these mysterious instruments and the man behind them
.

Antonio Stradivari was born in Cremona, Italy, in 1644. As a young man he came under the tutelage of a famous violin maker named Nicolo Amati. He proved a gifted student and, before his training was even completed, began putting his own labels on the violins he made, using the Latin form of his name,
Stradivarius
. He was about 22 years old.

Amati himself was a member of one of the most famous violin-making families in Italy. Of all the members of the Amati family, Nicolo was considered the most gifted craftsman—and yet even
his
violins couldn't compare to those of his pupil Stradivari.

As early as 1684, Stradivari began to experiment with the details of violin making in search of better sound. He found it, of course, and in the process gave the violin its modern form—shallower in construction, less arched in the belly and back, with an improved bridge and a new varnish, deeper and darker than the yellower varnish Amati had used.

In the 19th century, a few more changes were made to the design of violins so that they could be heard more easily in large auditoriums. But for the most part, all modern violins follow the style established by Stradivari more than 300 years ago…only they don't sound nearly as good as the original. When Stradivari died in 1737, he took many of his secrets to the grave with him.

Or did he?

It's estimated that Stradivari made more than 1,100 instruments in his lifetime; more than 450 of his violins survive to this day, as do numerous violas, cellos, guitars, and even a few harps. Many of his tools survive too, and so do many of the patterns and molds that
he used to fashion his instruments. But without his expert skills and knowledge, they're useless—even when experienced craftspeople use his original equipment, no one, Stradivari's admirers claim, has been able to make a violin as good as an original Stradivarius.

Stradivari has been dead for more than 250 years now, and people are still arguing over what it is that makes his musical instruments sound so beautiful. People have studied Stradivarius violin slivers under electron microscopes and taken violins to the hospital to have them CAT scanned. Some people have even taken these priceless instruments apart to precisely measure every piece and tiny detail of their construction, hoping to learn their secrets.

“You have to put in a thin blunt knife and ease it around to separate the pieces, breaking the glue,” explains Sandra Wagstaff, who cracked open her $2.2 million Stradivarius violin in 2001. “You hear, ‘Click, click, click,' and if it goes quiet, you stop.
Immediately
, because that means you're cutting into the wood.”

What do we have to show for more than two and a half centuries of such efforts? Not much. Music experts still can't agree on anything—what the secret is, whether there really
is
a secret, and if there is, whether Stradivarius even
knew
what it was.

Theory #1: It's in the man
. Like Picasso paintings, Stradivarius violins get their beautiful sound from his unique—and unreproducible—techniques. “The real secret,” says violin dealer Robert Bein, “is that Stradivari was an artist, and those instruments are imbued with that X-factor that we recognize as art. So the secret died with him.”

Theory #2: It's in the varnish
. Stradivari apparently used three layers of varnish: the first coat consisted of silica and potash, which was allowed to soak into the bare wood to give it strength; the second coat probably consisted of egg whites and honey or sugar; and the third coat was a mixture of gum arabic, turpentine, and a resin known as Venetian red. But—at least according to this school of thought—the details of Stradivari's varnish recipes may remain a mystery forever.

Theory #3: It's in our heads
. “If the audience sees you've got a Strad, you must be good because only good players have Strads,” explains Dr. Bernard Richardson, a musical acoustics specialist at the University of Cardiff in the United Kingdom. “There was no secret. We know the tools he used, the techniques he used, and
the wood he used, so there's no reason people should not make exactly the same instruments.”

Gregg Alf, a Michigan violin maker, agrees. “There's a lot of mumbo-jumbo about the Stradivarius mystique,” he says. Alf and his partner, Joseph Curtin, took apart a famous Stradivarius known as the Booth Stradivarius, measured it carefully, and built a precise replica—even down to the scratches—that, like the original, has a beautiful sound. Just
how
beautiful is open to interpretation, but it later sold at Sotheby's for $33,000, the highest price ever paid for a violin made by someone who isn't dead yet. Alf argues that, with practice, he'll be able to make replicas as good as or even better than the originals, especially considering that the originals have been aging and deteriorating for more than 250 years.

Theory #4: It's in the bugs
. According to this theory, Stradivari didn't have any secrets at all—tiny microbes in the wood he used are what give his violins their wonderful sound. In Stradivari's day, when trees were cut down the logs were thrown into the river and floated downstream to Venice, where they might soak in a lagoon for two or three years before they were finally sold. In this time the wood became waterlogged, allowing for rich growth of bacteria and fungus. These life forms ate away much of the pectin in the sap and also the hemicellulose, the organic material that holds moisture in wood.

With the hemicellulose gone, the wood became lighter, drier, and 50 times more permeable to varnish than ordinary wood. Stradivari's varnish contained 20 or more different minerals that caused it to dry with a hard gemlike finish that gave the wood excellent sound characteristics, unlike the gummy, oil-based varnishes that are popular today.

“This combination of highly permeable wood and a very hard composite varnish, which happened to be used by all craftsmen of the period, even on furniture, is what accounts for these remarkable acoustic properties,” theorizes Dr. Joseph Nagyvary, a biochemist at Texas A&M University. “Stradivari was a marvelous craftsman, but the magnificent sound of his instruments was a lucky accident.”

“Do you know why they haven't made any good violins in Italy for a hundred years?” Nagyvary asked in 1986. “In the 1840s, they dammed up the rivers.”

Theory #5: Update—The worms helped too
. In 2001 Dr. Nagyvary
revised his theories to give some credit for Stradivari's success to woodworms. Actually, the lack of them: Stradivari happened to be in business at a time when the region of Cremona was suffering through a woodworm epidemic. So Stradivari treated his wood with borax, a preservative, to keep the worms out. The borax also bound the molecules of the wood more tightly together, so in using this treatment, Stradivari unknowingly improved the wood's acoustic properties.

The epidemic passed at about the same time that Stradivari died, Nagyvary says, so subsequent violin makers from Cremona stopped treating their wood. When the sound quality of their instruments declined, they mistakenly assumed that Stradivari's “secrets” must have died with him…or so the theory goes.

If you ever happen to see an old violin at a flea market or a garage sale and notice that the label reads “Stradivarius,” go ahead and buy it if you want. But don't pay a lot of money for it and don't get your hopes up—it's probably a fake.