Stewart Pollens - Publications and Activities

Publications and Activities

Stewart Pollens has written extensively on stringed and early keyboard instruments, including The Violin Forms of Antonio Stradivari (London, 1992), The Early Pianoforte (Cambridge, 1995), Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù (London, 1998), François-Xavier Tourte: Bow Maker (New York, 2001), and The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar (Cambridge, 2003). He is a contributor to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and writes on a regular basis for The Strad.

Mr. Pollens's book The Violin Forms of Antonio Stradivari has been hailed as "the standard work on the evolution of Stradivarius's designs." This book contains life-size photographs of all of the extant wood forms and patterns used by Stradivari in the construction of his violins, violas, and cellos, and includes an analysis of their geometry.

In The Early Pianoforte, Pollens traces the history of the piano back to 1440, nearly three-hundred years before the work of Bartolomeo Cristofori, the harpsichord maker who is generally credited with having invented the piano in Florence around 1700. This book examines the work of numerous makers, including Henri Arnaut de Zwolle, Bartolomeo Cristofori, Giovanni Ferrini, Domenico del Mela, Henrique Van Casteel, Joachim José Antunes, Francisco Pérez Mirabal, Gottfried Silbermann, and Christian Ernst Friederici.

In François-Xavier Tourte: Bow Maker, Stewart Pollens and co-author Henryk Kaston provide a technical description of Francois Tourte's working methods and reveal new biographical facts based upon previously unpublished documents discovered in French archives.

Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù features 200 life-size color photographs taken by Pollens and complete technical documentation of the twenty-five Guarneri violins that were displayed in the “Masterpieces of Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù” exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1994. Containing newly discovered biographical and historical information, this is the most thorough study to date of this great maker and his work. Stewart Pollens contributed the chapter on dendrochronology, a scientific procedure used to determine the age of the wood used in making violins.

In 1999, Stewart Pollens challenged the authenticity of the world's most famous violin, the Ashmolean Museum's Messiah Stradivarius, in a series of articles published in the Journal of the Violin Society of America. The controversy initiated by these articles and presentations at the Violin Society of America and the American Federation of Violin Makers was widely reported in major newspapers and magazines throughout the world.