Thomastick-Infeld in strings history

HISTORY AND CURIOSITIES

0  comments

Thomastick-Infeld in strings history. 

Two of the greatest innovations of the 20th century come from Thomastick-Infeld, a company based in Wien: 

  • in 1914 they patented a machine to use the flat wire for the winding of a string, before of that the winding wire was always round, sometimes polished by hand after the winding process 


  • just before 1980 they patented the first synthetic core string for bowed instruments (winded with a flat wire): the Dominant string. Keep in mind this date, we tend to forget it. We are so used now to synthetic strings with a flat wire that it is hard to remember they are out for only 40 years now...

Ps: when I play modern I love Dominant: all that aluminium gives me the feeling of the roaring 20s, and it is easy to find nice colors and a sound full of overtones with almost no vibrato at all.

Tags

baroque music, double-bass strings, early music, gut strings, gut strings history, gut strings maintenance, gut strings manufacture, viol strings, viola da gamba strings, viola strings, violin strings, violoncello strings

You may also like

Italian gut string Factories Process, part 1

The “fresh gut” part  Let’s get started, and of course we start from Salle, in Abruzzi (Italy). We’ll go and see how a factory was organized in the 18th century. Yes, I said factory, not workshop. When you take out the intestine from a sheep, the first thing you need to do is to empty it someway.

Read More

Astro Di Russo – part 1

An autobiographical letter from Astro Di Russo, cordaio in Napoli – part 1 It was in October 2006, that I found myself sitting in a living room in Naples, thinking I was there just to take notes during a technical interview on string making… instead, that was the beginning of my research.  The old man sitting

Read More

D’Orazio strings 1978

1978, Salle, Italy:There was still one company selling pure gut strings sets following the old Italian tradition. Enrico D’Orazio produced music gut strings until his premature death in 1985.Let’s find out what type of strings are offered in his 1978 catalogue: History is sometimes filled with lucky and wonderful coincidences, but sometimes what could be

Read More
Leave a Comment