A fiddle carved like a crwth

This one is an experiment, and I love it for that. It is a small dance-fiddle after a sixteenth-century Danish pattern — the sort of thing I went looking for in the old collections at the Grassi museum in Leipzig. Where a violin is built up from many bent and glued pieces, this is carved from a single block with a flat front board laid on, the same way a crwth is made. So it sits right on the road between the two: the Welsh way of working, a Danish and Flemish shape, four strings and a bow. It reminds you that before the violin settled into the form we all know, there were a hundred carved fiddles being tried, each maker feeling his own way toward a voice.