User talk:Poderedellaluna
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The Blackbird, the Black Stone Violin.
[edit]Blackbird, the Black Stone Violin, is a playable, full-size violin mainly made of stone. It was made by the Swedish artist and sculptor Lars Widenfalk and finished in 1992.
The idea of constructing a musical instrument from stone came when the artist was working on a diabase sculpture. In 1990 Widenfalk had acquired a small stone of highest quality and blackness, a former gravestone. The size was right for an instrument like a violin.
Constructed to the designs of Stradivarius, with Widenfalks own technical solutions. The belly of the violin is only 2,5 mm thick at its thinnest point and was constructed with sound-holes, back and scroll. The ribs were made in one piece by sawing out a 30 mm thick plate shaped to the form the external contour and removing the inside using water-drill and hand-tools to create a thin rib, no more then a couple of millimetres thick at its thinnest point.
Diabase is a very dense and crystalline magmatic rock. It is formed in all times ,although the black diabase used here is ca 1.6 billion years old (belly and ribs) from the Skåne province in southern Sweden. The back plate was made of a porphyritic diabase, ca 1.9 billion years old, from the province of Härjedalen in central Sweden. Finger board, pegs, tailpiece, and chin-rest were all made of the ordinary black ebony. To ensure that the pegs would fit, Widenfalk prepared conical drills, since the pegs themselves are conical and are tightened to produce the right pitch. The bridge was made of yellow mammoth ivory from the Siberian taiga and the interior surface of the corpus was lined with real gold. Precision bonding of the parts was done using two component glue and the neck secured with two silvers steel pins where it was joined to the body.
Since the stone violin was gleaming black, the name Blackbird was obvious. This follows the tradition of Stradivarius who's creations often got their own individual names connected with birds.
The Swedish composer Sven David Sandström composed music specially for this instrument, which received its first performance in the Swedish Pavilion at World Expo 92 in Seville. Since then, the violin has been exhibited and played in Washington, Nürnberg, Monza, Milan, Rome, Luxembourg, Oslo, Dubai, Prague and Stockholm.
References
www.sdsandstrom.net http://gulfnews.com/life-style/people/as-a-work-of-art-it-is-unique-1,275749 http://opusone.se/faceiiface2009 http://noicejunk.eu/asse http://lb.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lars_Widenfalk
www.widenfalk.com
Rocks and geology
http://www.sgu.se/dokument/om_sgu_remisser-2009/46-2037-2007.pdf In Swedish
http://www.sgu.se/dokument/om_sgu_remisser-2009/46-2034-2007.pdf) In Swedish
http://www-markinfo.slu.se/eng/soildes/berggr.htm
Photos of the Black Stone Violin at Wikimedia: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/file:The_Blackbird._Black_and_white_photo._2jpg (No1-3. and File:The Blackbird.On Red Velvet!jpg