Spring Blossom

This spring, the venerable Peabody Institute opens its doors on a $26.8 million physical renovation, as well as a revamped curriculum designed to prepare musicians for the cultural realities of the 21st century. "It's an announcement to the world of an upgraded and reimagined conservatory," says Peabody director Robert Sirota of the April festivities.

The Peabody, established in 1857, is the nation's oldest music academy. However, one price of its longevity was operating in a pair of cramped 19th-century buildings. The renovation—during which the school remained open–has added offices, practice rooms, a 100-seat theater, and a grand arcade and pavilion, as well as entry features that open the conservatory up more to its Baltimore neighborhood.

As far as the curriculum is concerned, says Sirota, "We are working to create a new paradigm of what music conservatories are supposed to do." That means turning music students into "music entrepreneurs," equipped with technological savvy and an ability to do everything from writing resumés and preparing their own taxes to organizing arts education programs and interacting with their communities. "We're teaching people how to run orchestras, not just play in them," he adds.

Still, performance remains the foundation of the Peabody's curriculum, and the institute aims to attract top string students with such recent faculty hires as violinist Pamela Frank and cellist Amit Peled, with Michael Kannen (formerly of the Brentano and Meliora quartets) running the chamber-music program. Says Sirota, "We're making a tremendous effort to be one of the top three string schools in the country. All these new activities are really just upgrading what we already do, so we are really and truly the best."

—James Reel

Strad's Secrets Revealed?

The ancient mystery of the rich resonance heard in Stradivari violins may have been solved. The secret? An extended period of long winters and cool summers—known as the "Little Ice Age"—led to extremely dense wood with special acoustic properties, according to a pair of scientists.

Dr. Henri Grissino-Mayer, a tree-ring dating expert at the University of Tennessee, and Dr. Lloyd Burckle, a climatologist at Columbia University, first published the theory last summer but it wasn't made public until December.

Grissino-Mayer is no stranger to the violin world: Two years ago, the Violin Society of America hired him to study the world's most celebrated Strad violin, known as "The Messiah."

The Little Ice Age reached its coldest point between 1640 and 1710, a period known as the Maunder Minimum, named for the 19th-century pioneering solar astronomer, E.W. Maunder, who first proposed the controversial theory that a scarcity of sunspots led to the unusually cool temperatures.

Antonio Stradivari, born a year before the onset of the Maunder Minimum, created his most treasured stringed instruments from 1700 to 1720, as the Little Ice Age ended.

"We would suggest that the narrow tree rings that identify the Maunder Minimum in Europe played a role in the enhanced sound quality of instruments produced by the Cremona violin makers," Grissino-Mayer and Burckle wrote in the obscure scientific journal Dendrochronologia, noting that "narrow tree rings would not only strengthen the violin but would increase the wood's density.

"The onset of the Maunder Minimum at a time when the skills of the Cremonese violin makers reached their zenith perhaps made the difference in the violin's tone and brilliance."

A Legend Passes

Scottish fiddler Johnny Cunningham died of an apparent heart attack on December 15. He was 46. Cunningham, a prominent figure on the Celtic music scene, took up the fiddle at age seven. As a teen, he founded the energetic Scottish band Silly Wizard, and later toured with his accordion-playing brother, Phil, and the band Relativity. Cunningham was a mainstay in the band The Celtic Fiddle Festival with Irish fiddler Kevin Burke and Breton fiddler Christian Lemaitre.

"Johnny was a dear friend, a wonderful musician, and probably the only person who could make me, on an otherwise sober afternoon, literally helpless with laughter," recalls Burke. "Some images I have of Johnny: long wavy blond hair, an ample black leather jacket, a pair of sunglasses perched slightly askew, black and red cowboy boots from his favorite clothing store in Texas, an image from the Book of Kells in the form of a bright red tattoo on his forearm, an elegant walking cane to assist his less than elegant gait. While his appearance was definitely more Pulp Fiction than Rob Roy, Johnny loved the traditional music of his Scottish homeland. His fiddle could fill us with the joy of raucous good times and also conjure up moments of aching tenderness. We'll miss him terribly."