The Urge to Destroy a Violin

Since last summer, the Instagram account @violintorture has offered a riposte to the centuries-old craft of violin-making, or lutherie. “Can you still play a violin after cutting it up?” the account’s creator, Tyler Thackray, asked before sawing an instrument into thirds, to celebrate his ten thousandth follower. (The answer, somehow, is yes.) The basement of Thackray’s home in San Francisco, which he calls his “dungeon,” is filled with a pullulating population of misfit instruments, cobbled together from cheap violins that he acquires online. There is a violin with the strings installed underneath its body, so that it can only be played upside down. Another with no head, in a nod to the haunting of Ichabod Crane. A “slim-olin” conjured by slicing a violin in half. A violinist myself, I shuddered through a video in which a violin seems to writhe as Thackray saws off its scroll. Was this possibly an issue for the local A.S.P.C.A.?

In the four and a half centuries since the Cremonese luthier Andrea Amati helped bring the modern-day violin to life, the instrument has become an object of near-religious devotion. The commenters on Thackray’s Instagram fume over his sacrilegious antics: “I’m sure you’re a great person, but man do I hate this account,” one person writes. Thackray, who is thirty-nine and works as a software engineer, cannot actually play the violin—his primary instrument is the electric bass, though he also identifies as an amateur viola-da-gamba player—and many of the professional violinists whom he has e-mailed about trying his mutant instruments have refused. He feeds off the derision, describing himself as a button-pusher with a jones for arguing online. “I guess you could just call me an asshole,” he admitted during a Zoom call, while his twin pugs, Brucie and Bozu, snored in his lap. “There’s times where I will build a violin and think, Someone’s going to hate this. It’s one of my biggest motivations.”

Like salami or the flush toilet, the violin is considered among the rare instances of human ingenuity that, centuries after its invention, has left virtually nothing to be desired. During the eighteenth century, in the violin-making capital of Cremona, in modern-day Italy, the Amati, Stradivari, and Guarneri families united power, tone, and aesthetics in developing the instrument that remains the prototype for violins today. The celebrated luthier Joseph Curtin describes most violin innovations as “shaving a few tenths of a second off the hundred-meter dash”: tiny acoustical adjustments to the instrument’s existing form. If the violin world errs conservative, the reasons, according to the luthier Julie Reed-Yeboah, are self-evident. “The shape is the shape it has to be,” she said. “The whole violin has a purpose.”

Within this world of hallowed tradition, Thackray has let his Franken-instruments loose. “I was always choosing the alt thing,” he said of high school, where he was a class clown, sporting dreadlocks and piercings, listening to a lot of metal, and playing the electric bass. These days, he has pared down to short hair and two tasteful sets of ear gauges and lip rings, which are softened by his frequent smiles, and a gallery of tattoos inspired by Japanese mythology. Thackray had long bristled at the violin’s goody-goody airs as expressed by those such as TwoSet Violin, an Australian classical-music comedy duo with more than three million subscribers on YouTube. During lockdown, a friend suggested that Thackray revisit an earlier interest in lutherie, sparked when he was learning the upright bass some years ago. “From a purely business perspective, I thought I could start an Insta and be TwoSet’s archnemesis,” he said. While repairing his first instrument, a violin he purchased on a whim, Thackray realized that the clamps required to hold the parts together were reminiscent of a torture device. An Instagram handle was born.

Thackray has only respect for skilled luthiers and will readily admit that he is not one. “There’s times when my hand slips—stupid mistakes like that,” he said. “Most of the time, when I screw up, it’s because I’m a little drunk.” The @violintorture account is less about innovating within the bounds of the violin than it is about rocketing out of bounds: gutting instruments and then ramming their parts together to unleash unforeseen, chaotic potential. As a mostly self-taught hobbyist, the sort whose hobby has colonized his entire basement, Thackray has no plans to turn a profit, and so he is free to realize the demented, “disruptive” violin visions that would destroy a traditional luthier’s reputation. “My whole approach is, basically, do what the other guys can’t,” he said.

Like the evolution of species, the evolution of the violin is marked with a number of experiments that didn’t catch on. The nineteenth-century French violin maker Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, for all his skill, introduced a number of solutions for violinists that history has shown the door, including an ill-conceived metal bow (too easy to dent). Modern makers such as Curtin have offered promising directions for the violin by wielding scientific insights in a field that has historically held new technologies at arm’s length. Curtin’s Ultralight line reduces the weight of the instrument and offers players a way to make adjustments to certain aspects that would normally require a technician, such as string height. Another unconventional violin, the luthier Andrew Carruthers’s Turtle Fiddle, developed last year, draws inspiration from the blistered appearance of its namesake’s shell.

For most players, these innovative instruments amount to eccentric distant cousins, interesting in theory but not worth the risk. The researcher Karin Bijsterveld, working with the bassist Marten Schulp, has described how musicians tend to resist innovations in orchestral instruments, even adjustments that might make them easier to play. Performers want to preserve a sense of identity and pride, not to mention their livelihoods, from having mastered instruments with a vertiginous learning curve.

Thackray is not asking anyone to trade in their Strad for a slim-olin—one, after all, is not like the other—but, rather, to posit that the violin can be a tabula rasa for gleeful, impractical experimentation. “Classical music is so fucking serious that people lose their sense of the fact that the instrument is a form of entertainment,” he said. “It’s still art, and the purpose should be fun.” He holds that craft in lutherie is secondary to having ideas—like in his first major projects, the violele and ukulin, a violin with a ukelele’s neck and vice versa. In recent months, Thackray has expanded his workshop to include a computer-numerical-control (C.N.C.) and 3-D printer. These devices are considered verboten among luthiers, who pride themselves on achieving results purely with their own hands. A traditional violin can take around hundreds of hours to make, not including the many years of training and apprenticeship that qualify one to coax an instrument from a few slabs of wood.

As Thackray walked me through his dungeon via Zoom, he pointed out violins, cellos, guitars, ukeleles, an erhu, a Stroh violin (itself a hybrid of violin and horn), and other instruments sprawled across tables and the floor, awaiting their fate. Maneuvering between machines, wood piles, cabinets, and benches laden with tools, he picked up a torturing-in-progress: an instrument that will be a violin in the front and a mandolin on the back, with two necks and twelve strings—“if it works,” he added slyly, with all the bedside manner of a vulture. As he rattled off a list of increasingly outlandish future projects, he turned into an adjacent space that is home to honey-filled buckets and other remnants of his original plan to turn the basement into a mead plant (he is also a beekeeper), though he has not harvested a drop since his violin habit took hold. His girlfriend, accustomed to his whiplash passions, didn’t blink.

Most of Thackray’s work, such as a crowdsourced 3-D-printed violin made from a design by the Portland-based product designer David Perry, is inspired by followers and luthiers with whom he has connected through Instagram—and some of them have, in turn, been inspired by him to create their own violin projects. Although Thackray aims to demonstrate that starting in lutherie need not entail hermitage in a remote Italian village, he is transparent about how quickly the hobby can leave one’s wallet gasping. Even a damaged violin or a so-called V.S.O.—a “violin-shaped object” which looks and feels like a violin but, owing to damning structural issues, cannot be played to any satisfaction—can run higher than a hundred dollars, and Thackray, an Android developer with income to spare, has now footed the cost for more than forty.

The process of “torturing” in the name of innovation has led Thackray to reconsider his own preconceptions about the violin. “The human body seems so delicate, but you can fall down the side of a mountain, get hit by a car, and still survive,” he mused, considering how many of his victims still manage to make sound. “The violin has that same dichotomy—it’s both robust and not.” Moreover, for all the violin’s innocent posturing, the instrument is an embalming in plain sight, a collage of animal remains often obtained through slaughter. Bows can include leather, mother-of-pearl, or even ivory, a result of poaching, in their construction, as well as the requisite hair, usually from horses that have already been killed for their byproducts; their skin, bones, and tendons are also transformed into the hide glue that keeps the violin together. Furthermore, per their name, the gut strings used mainly by early-music practitioners typically contain sheep intestines. Accounting for all this gore, the dose of horror with which Thackray imbues his Instagram starts to seem redundant.

During our conversation, Reed-Yeboah, the luthier, expressed repeatedly that she considers Thackray’s work to be of such poor craftsmanship as to be “a waste of [her] time.” Yet she acknowledged that he had at least distinguished himself, and, regarding his handle, that he was on to something. “I think a lot of people have sadistic thoughts about violins somehow,” she said, carefully. “Certainly, when you’re working many hours to produce this thing and it’s still not going the way you thought, you start thinking of things. Things to . . . do.” I knew what she meant, for I had felt it, too: a hideous thrill that sloshes through my veins as I am pulverized by some sonata passage.

The notion that you can torture—or to be tortured by—a violin in the first place arises from our sense that the instrument is somehow alive, responsive, perhaps even agential, as the ethnomusicologist Eliot Bates has suggested, with a social life that intersects with other instruments, people, histories. So much of playing an instrument is having your existence dictated by its demands, to the extent that your body and your instrument come to seem inseparable. When my friend first messaged me a video of Thackray hacking a V.S.O. into pieces, I whimpered. Then I watched the video again, and again. Eventually, I made my peace with it. These are not instruments that anyone will miss, and @violintorture is ferrying them into a hitherto inconceivable afterlife.

Thackray has no grand plans for the future of his work. “I’m pretty much a nihilist,” he said. “I don’t have kids, and I don’t plan on it. Violin-making tends to be generational, so, if you don’t have the sons to pass it down to, the chance to create a legacy is pretty slim. I’m probably the guy who’s going to end up dead in his basement with fifty thousand violins in a nameless estate sale.” At least one of Thackray’s current projects, however, is calculated for the long haul: uniting his interests in bees and lutherie, he placed a V.S.O. in one of his hives, hoping that the bees would colonize the inside. In a video post, he indicates that this may take a while. For now, the bees crawl gently over the top, with all the tenderness of a child holding an instrument for the first time.