Viola Day and Viola Sound

December 2025

Last weekend I went to a viola day in Birmingham, organised in conjunction with the Tertis and Aaronovitch viola competitions, which took place last January in Gateshead.

The format was somewhat unusual, no public, but a room with viola enthusiasts all playing together, with tables for violin makers and their instruments around the edge.

Besides the buzz of enthusiastic violists, it was good to catch up with some other instrument makers, especially some of the younger ones who could benefit from a little guidance and encouragement; although plenty of time has passed, it doesn’t seem so long ago that I was in their position!

Hearing lots of different instruments being played is always interesting, but the day only reinforced what I have long understood, that the sound different violas produce, and the sound different violists prefer is very diverse.

Recently, I have noticed a tendency amongst some towards a viola sound that is quite hard. It might seem as though this sort of sound is stronger, and especially on a C string, if the lower resonances are somewhat lacking, a higher tension string can certainly help. But for me, for my taste, some strings, and some set-ups, make an instrument just sound too tough and uncompromising.

For me, I like a warmer sound, admittedly with enough edge so you can hear the beginning of a note and push the sound out, particularly on the A string, but I don’t like hard. Because music is about subtlety, about variation in mood, in colour, and one of those colours is made, as a player, by doing almost nothing, which means that the basic ‘noise’ an instrument makes should be pleasant.

There’s an old, and not very good joke, about a man who started to play the cello. His wife listened over weeks as the man practised, playing just one note. After a while his wife suggested that other players played a lot of different notes.
‘Ah,’ the man says, ‘but I’ve found just the right note!’

What I actually think he found was not the right note but the right sound, a sound in his instrument that was fulfilling for him, and as a musician that is hugely important, but like in any relationship warmth is better than hardness!