The physics of violin, when music and science meet
India, Aug. 9 -- In 1922 a young man, C Subrahmanya Ayyar, gave his first solo performance playing the violin at the Presidency College, Madras. The soiree was followed by a lecture by Ayyar's younger brother on the physical properties of the sound made by the violin. The latter was none other than the eminent physicist, Sir CV Raman. The connection between physics and the violin went much further. Ayyar himself would quote from the works of eminent physicists like Hermann von Helmholtz in his writings on the violin and Raman would go on to build a "mechanical violin player".
In the roughly two decades between World Wars I and II, Indian physicists published nearly a dozen papers in the two foremost international physics journals of the day, The Physical Review and The Philosophical Magazine, on the violin or research closely related to it. There were many more papers in local scientific journals as well. The history of the violin in the hands of Indian physicists is an excellent opportunity to reflect on the relationship between science and culture.
Music historian Amanda Weidman relates Ayyar and Raman's interest in the violin to the larger history of the creation of a "classical" form of Carnatic music. The first violins had arrived in India in the 1760s in Calcutta. But they were soon taken up by musicians in southern India. Baluswamy Dikshitar, the brother of composer Muthuswamy Dikshitar; the composer-king of Travancore (in today's Kerala) Swati Tirunal; His court performer Vadivelu; and Varahappayar, the canny minister of Maharaja Serfoji of Thanjavur, are all known to have played the violin around the dawn of the 19th century.
A century later, by the 1920s, the violin had been thoroughly incorporated into Carnatic music. But strenuous efforts were being made to distance it from its earlier historical connections to Irish and Scottish fiddling - from which the Kannada name for it, piteelu, had derived, and to establish it as a classical instrument. Even the way the instrument was held, often using one's feet, were vigorously criticised by reformers such as Ayyar who sought to reshape its profile and playing technique to align it with classical western conventions.
Weidman also points to the explicit links between these classicising tendencies and the expression of modernised caste and class identities. There were even advertisements of violins targeted explicitly to the then-rising Brahmin middle class in colonial Madras.
Such biographical and social context might suggest that the Indian physicist's enthusiasm for the violin was entirely derived from the social milieu of colonial Madras. That, however, would be misleading. If we look closer at the places and people involved in violin research, we find a more complicated history.
The man who published the most in international journals on the violin was Kulesh Chandra Kar. His very first paper on the subject, while still a student, would be published in the Philosophical Magazine. It was indeed Raman himself who first suggested this line of research to Kar. Kar was himself a musical enthusiast and so he readily embraced the research. But Kar had no discernible relationship to Carnatic music or the social life of Madras. Born in Bihar, Kar was mostly educated in Calcutta and went on to teach at the physics department of Presidency College, Calcutta.
As a charismatic teacher, Kar was successful in getting several talented students interested in violin research. One of the students who took up violin research through his influence was BK Sen. Sen went on to work at the physics department of Rajshahi College, in present-day Bangladesh. Like Kar, Sen too rebuilt and improved upon the mechanical violin player originally designed by Raman. Unfortunately, Sen's model was left behind and eventually destroyed during the Partition.
Other, younger researchers such as NK Datta and SK Ghosh, at Presidency College, Calcutta and RN Ghosh at Allahabad University would also publish multiple papers on violin-research. They too worked with versions of the mechanical violin player.
Based in Allahabad, Calcutta, Shibpur, and Rajshahi, most of these researchers were Bengalis. They had little exposure to Carnatic music and certainly were not caught up in the social processes of colonial Madras, as Ayyar and Raman had been. Those amongst them that were musically inclined had their ears tuned to Hindustani classical music, rather than Carnatic.
The violin had never been adopted into Hindustani music the way it had been absorbed into Carnatic music. It was only around the mid-1940s that VG Jog began to introduce the violin into Hindustani classical circles. Scientists like Kar, Datta, or Ghosh, would, therefore, be unlikely to associate the instrument directly with their own musical tastes.
In fact, it is possible that the basis of the interest in violin acoustics amongst Calcutta physicists had roots that predated Raman's. Ramendrasundar Tribedi, a physicist and prolific science-writer, had written about experiments with the violin that were similar - though much simpler - than the ones conducted by Raman sometime around the 1910s. The essay was published in 1926, four years after Tribedi's death. Tribedi was extremely prominent in Calcutta's intellectual circles. He was a close friend and later relative by marriage to Rabindranath Tagore as well as being a founding member and president of the Bengali Literary Association. His work and writings would therefore have been influential for younger researchers.
Yet, Tribedi was a connoisseur and student of Hindustani classical music. The roots of Tribedi's influence, like Ayyar's, went back to the research of Helmholtz, whom Tribedi addressed as "Mahatma Helmholtz".
While personal interests and cultural resonances often amplified the attraction of particular lines of research, physics also had its own intellectual lineages. The violin, through Helmholtz, had emerged as much a research tool as a musical instrument. The two biographies of the violin - as research tool and musical instrument - occasionally intersected and occasionally did not. To completely conflate the two would not only be misleading but would also caricature the complicated relationship between science and culture.
Like people, objects such as the violin, perform in multiple arenas of human existence and creativity. Culture and science are both such arenas. The mutual relationship of these two arenas cannot be predetermined. It unfolds differently in different historical contexts and through the actual traffic of people and objects between these arenas....
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