Baritone Violins

The William Sidney Mount Historic 1852 “Cradle of Harmony”

In the 1840s, the artist, inventor and musician, William Sidney Mount, invented a new type of violin. He received a U.S. Patent in 1852. The violins came in both a trapezoidal and a 'guitar-shaped' form. Both types, instead of having a carved top and back, utilized bent flat plates, the top being convex and the back concave. For this reason, Mount's instruments are sometimes called "hollow-back" violins. There were other differences from regular violins, such as the reverse sound holes on the guitar-shaped version of his instrument.

An interesting note is that Mount wrote quite a few fiddle tunes, familiar to Old-Time fiddlers in the Northeast of the U.S. This genre is often called “Down East” style. One of his most famous tunes is ‘Shep Jones' Hornpipe’...the owner of Fiddarci Lutherie is also named Shep Jones...it kind of gave us goose bumps. Mount's painting, 'Dance of the Haymakers' used Shep

Jones' barn as the setting.

By all accounts, Mount’s instruments were extremely loud for their size; which is what Mount was trying to achieve, as he wanted to be heard above the other instruments when performing on fiddle...he was not shy! Alas, the high projection volume of Mount’s instruments proved to be one of the factors contributing to their ultimate obscurity today. Apparently, the Cradles of Harmony were too loud for orchestral use. There were other factors, not the least of which was the fact Mount was not very diligent at marketing them or having them manufactured in great numbers. As is the case with many inventors, Mount invented something that he wanted for himself. Besides, he was busy enough as an extremely prolific painter and is well-known today, at least by students of Art History. Many of his paintings are quite familiar to people living today even if they do not know the artist, such as “The Banjo Player” and “Dance of the Haymakers”.

While Mount made perhaps as many as a dozen instruments, only a few instruments survive today, most of them owned by a division of the Smithsonian Institution, only one or two of them are in playable condition. Apparently Mount was not as good as a luthier as he was as an inventor and designer. The same can be said of other noteworthy musical instrument inventor/designers such as Orville Gibson, founder of the Gibson Mandolin Co. and inventor of the modern mandolin. Any serious student of the modern mandolin knows that those made by Orville Gibson himself are of extremely poor quality.

Fundamental differences between Rickert-Fiddarci Octave Violins and the Original Cradle of Harmony from 1852

Unlike the 19th Century William Sidney Mount instruments, which had a single bass bar placed in the center of the soundboard, and no sound post, the Don Rickert design instruments utilize the many discoveries of decades of bass bar research and “best practices”, and use a sound post as well. Another departure from Mount's creation was the radius of the bend for the convex top and the concave back (approximately 21") rather than the approximate 18" radius used by Mount…in other words, the bend in the modern tops and backs is not as extreme.

Also, the original Cradles of Harmony were NOT octave violins and had ribs approximately 29mm in height, in contrast to the ribs of almost 40mm used on the Rickert-Fiddarci Octave Violins—there are a considerable extra cubic centimeters of airspace inside of the sound box of our Octave Violins. The extra airspace, combined with our own experimentation with bass bar tuning and aperture (soundhole) size is one of the secrets of the beautiful and powerful sound our instruments produce.