Tag: Music

The Maunder Minimum’s Impact on Stradivari’s Unique Violins | September 18 2025, 21:20

I stumbled upon an interesting scientific hypothesis from 2003 regarding why Stradivari violins (and those of his contemporaries) are so unique. Traditional hypotheses—about the secrets of the varnish or the aging of the wood—prove insufficient. According to this hypothesis, the entire blame lies with the Maunder Minimum, a period of reduced solar activity occurring from 1645–1715, during which the tree growth rate slowed down due to the climate, meaning the wood was denser. The hypothesis suggests that amidst the perfect combination of altitude, humidity, and temperature, this environmental shift provided material with unique properties, ideal for resonant soundboards.

Stradivari was born a year before the Maunder Minimum began. His “Amati Period” (1666–1690), “Experimentation Period” (1690–1700), and “Golden Period” (1700–1720), during which he perfected and produced his best instruments (see Henley 1961), all coincided with the Maunder Minimum. Cremona’s craftsmen during this period used the only wood available to them, i.e., from trees growing during the Maunder Minimum. Neither before nor after this period was such wood available. And, probably, it is nowhere to be found in the world even now.

But really, modern violins are also quite something. Two-three hundred years ago, musicians extracted the maximum from an instrument through trial and error, whereas now it is done through meticulous calculation of sound. It is almost impossible to differentiate violins by their sound anymore, and the difference lies in the realm of individual preferences, rather than an undisputed objective worse-better.

Revisiting Antalya: 25 Years Later and Family Bonds | September 15 2025, 15:56

I’m back from Antalya. I was there last time 25 years ago. This time I met up with my mom (she’s from Russia) and showed her Turkey №2. Turkey №1 was last year (Istanbul). Here are some photos from this trip. All taken on an iPhone (I brought a camera too, but was too lazy to carry it around).

Russian pop music is no longer blasting from every speaker, but Modern Talking and similar genres are everywhere, until midnight. I was lucky to rent a hotel just 9 steps away from a night bar that quiets down at midnight, but no worries, we got used to it quickly and the music is decent. The city has many Russians, not only because it’s easy to get there, but also because Turkey offers citizenship for $400K — a sum many Russians can afford for a “passport”. But there’s really nothing to do there. You can tour all the natural sites within the first year or two, and then it’s just a very boring city. No museums, no cultural activities, except for more Modern Talking from the bars. So, at a minimum, you need not only to go there for the passport but also actively use it to live somewhere else.

My mom did great, handling all those hills and boats, and had a lot of impressions. Actually, she has only been abroad in Riga and twice in Turkey, last year in Istanbul and this year in Antalya. I really hope for her 80th birthday next year we’ll go somewhere else where Russians don’t need a visa.

The Ingenious Spy Device Gifted in Friendship: Unveiling The Thing | September 01 2025, 01:03

Today in the museum I saw The Thing in person – simply a brilliant espionage device. In 1945, a group of Soviet schoolchildren presented a large wooden Great Seal of the United States to the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow, Averell Harriman, as a “gesture of friendship”. The seal was beautifully hand-carved and hung in the ambassador’s office for a whole 7 years. And it leaked secrets!

No batteries involved! It was all very clever, especially for 1945.

Essentially, it was a passive radio relay or “parasitic resonator”. Inside the wooden seal was a small metal cylinder with a membrane and an antenna-rod.

Soviet operators directed a specific frequency radio wave (about 330 MHz) into the ambassador’s office.

Inside the device was a cavity resonator, tuned to the same frequency. It “responded” to the radio signal and began to retransmit it back.

On one side of the cylinder was a thin flexible membrane. It vibrated from the sound in the room (voices, footsteps).

The vibrations of the membrane altered the capacity and resonance parameters of the device, slightly shifting the reflected radio signal by frequency and phase. This was the modulation of speech onto the external signal.

Outside the building (like in a KGB car nearby), the retransmitted signal was received and the sound modulation was extracted – effectively capturing the overheard conversation.

Why was this almost impossible to detect? The device had no battery and emitted nothing by itself. It “came to life” only when irradiated with an external radio signal. In standard radio monitoring checks, it remained “dead”. Essentially, it was akin to an ancestor of the RFID tag – a passive device that operates only on external request.

But most interestingly, the inventor was Leon Theremin, the same person behind the musical instrument “thereminvox” (played with hands in the air).

His biography reads like a novel. In the early 1920s, Theremin went to the U.S., patented his thereminvox instrument, and collaborated with RCA; his New York studio was visited by Charlie Chaplin, Albert Einstein, Gershwin, and other notable personalities. It is written that he visited the USSR – Already in 1926, he demonstrated television at the Kremlin.

At that time, televisions with screens the size of a matchbox were being created, but his television had a huge screen (1.5 x 1.5 m) and a resolution of 100 lines. In 1927, the scientist demonstrated his installation to Soviet military leaders K.E. Voroshilov, I.V. Tukhachevsky, and S.M. Budyonny:

state minds watched in horror as Stalin walked through the Kremlin courtyard on the screen.

This sight so frightened them that the invention was immediately classified and quietly buried in the archives, and television was soon invented by the Americans.

Eventually, in 1938, he secretly returned to the USSR, but was soon arrested as a “non-returnee” and sent to the camps, but his talent was still used in the so-called “sharashka” – on projects together with Sergei Korolev, including the development of radio-controlled apparatuses and listening systems, including the aforementioned “Great Seal bug”.

Concert Weeks: From Pink Martini to Postmodern Jukebox | July 30 2025, 03:40

I have two weeks of concerts. Today — Pink Martini! Next week Postmodern Jukebox, and this past weekend was a great piano concert (Beethoven, Shostakovich, Chopin, Rachmaninoff at the Washington Piano Festival). Facebook cuts out the sound from concert recordings, so I’m attaching a cool video that’s already been cleared (or missed) by Facebook from some Pink Martini performance, featuring Thomas Lauderdale with Hunter Noack, who is either his wife or husband, and I’ll try to add my own in the comments

Exploring Unusual Time Signatures: From Prokofiev to Pink Floyd | July 28 2025, 05:32

A small concert at a Catholic university. Prokofiev’s 7th sonata features a tricky musical meter — 7/8. It’s interesting, but it seems I’ve never heard or known anything else in this meter. Early 20th-century composers were quite the innovators. Oh, I remember now. The closest to 7/8 was in Pink Floyd’s “Money” with their 7/4.