Hutchins would like to see her teaching start
to reach string players themselves. Her work has done much to
demystify instruments, but most players do not read scientific
journals and many makers are only glad to retain the mystery.
She offers the following as important pieces of advice for players
of violin family instruments:[FN
124]
• It is possible for violin makers today, using
technical information that's been developed over the last
thirty years, to make fine violins every time. There is
no need to pay millions of dollars to get a good instrument
• It will take some years for an instrument to
be "played in"; you can't do it overnight even
though we can shake them up [accomplished by playing a
radio station through a speaker attached to the bridge]
and make them sound better temporarily. You can't do it
in a hurry... If you look in the Hill book on the Guarneri
family it says that it takes anywhere from twenty to eighty
years to properly season a violin when it's been played
fairly consistently by a good player. Now that says several
things. It's the time...it's consistent, and a good player.
I don't think we're ever going to prove this, but I'm
almost sure that it takes a good player to make a really
fine sounding instrument because the instruments will
respond to what's being done to them. As I shake them
with a radio station, a lot of yickety-yak comes through
at the same time...it's not the same thing as being well-played.
• I think violin players should realize what happens
when violins are repaired and restored, and what happens
to them tone-wise, not just box-wise. You know you can
make a pretty box, but you can also louse up the tone
rather effectively.
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Hutchins has received a number of honors during
her long career, including two Guggenheim Fellowships (1959, 1961),
four grants from the Martha Baird Rockefeller Fund for Music (1966,
1974, 1978, 1982), and honorary degrees from the Stevens Institute
of Technology (1977), Hamilton College (1984), St. Andrews Presbyterian
College (1988), and Concordia University (1992), and the Silver
Medal from the Acoustical Society of America (1981). No honor,
however, has ever deterred her from continuing her work, which
goes on with continued vigor and uncompromising standards at the
age of 82. In 1993 she was in Baltimore for Yo-Yo Ma's concert
and to the Stockholm International Music Acoustics Conference,
and she continues to plan for the future. Hutchins knows that
she has started more projects than she can finish in her lifetime,
but in the end sees herself as part of the history of violin-making
and research, a history that is still being written.