Roland Hutchinson

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on August 26, 2007 at 9:08 AM, updated November 09, 2007 at 5:17 PM

Strings Attached
Orchestra and math geek leads the charge for obscure instruments


Roland Hutchinson lives in two distinct eras.
His heart is in the 17th century, rooted there by the string instruments whose gentle sound captured his affection from the moment he heard it.

His brain occupies the cutting edge of the 21st century, whether demonstrating his instruments on YouTube or helping debug Linux, the group-written free computer operating system.

He calls himself "the Garden State's leading violist da gamba," knowing full well that is comparable to being ruler of an exceptionally small duchy.

A self-described orchestra and band geek, he is also a math geek. He doesn't wear that fraternity's classic badge, the pocket protector -- it might interfere with his playing. But the cheerful 53-year-old occasionally sports another telltale emblem: eyeglasses held together with tape.

As a gamba enthusiast, he serves as its cheerleader, its protector, its rescuer. Viols have been on the bubble of extinction for more than 200 years, lovingly ferried to the next generation by people like Hutchinson.

"The instrument has always found its champions," he says.

Growing up in California, he played the viola and occasionally the tuba, which got him out of gym class. A band director ran a summer course on music history, where Hutchinson discovered early music (that is, music before the death of J.S. Bach) and the recorder.

Switched on music
He headed to MIT intending to major in math, but took his recorders with him and played with an early music group at Wellesley. There, on a fateful visit to a friend's house one Thanksgiving, he heard the viola da gamba.

"I fell in love with the instrument," he says. "And I said, `I have to make that sound.'"

Since little viols look like violins and big viols look like cellos, what sets their sound apart?

The viol has six strings instead of four, with a flat back and sloping shoulders. Viewed from the side, it is thicker, boxier -- sort of a deep-dish variation. Yet the wood plates are shaved thinner, making it lighter.

Modern instruments are designed to be loud, with energy from the bow transferred efficiently to produce sound. But when the bow stops, the sound evaporates.

The viol, however, rings long after the bowing ceases. It's a bright and lively sound that fairly springs from the instrument. Hold a viol and the strings actually vibrate in sympathetic resonance with one's voice. It feels almost alive, like holding a purring cat.

The college math major switched to a music major ("At MIT, one follows one's passion.") -- and he never looked back. He then got a master's in music from Stanford and embarked on his still-unfinished doctoral research. The topic: how each era's perception of numbers impacts its musical style.

Along the way, he met another musical enthusiast, Gina Balestracci, whom he married. She is into all types of choral music and is the administrator of the Cali School of Music at Montclair State University. They live in Montclair.

Seeking converts
Now, he cobbles together a living as a teacher (private lessons, sometimes music history classes at Montclair State) and a performer. He has performed as a soloist and chamber musician in Britain, the Netherlands, Austria, Hungary, Slovakia, Canada and the United States. He has recorded CDs of C.P.E. Bach and Joseph Haydn, and also does some substitute conducting on the local classical music scene.

"Who makes a living playing the viol? I think I know of about three people," he says.

There are probably about three dozen people in New Jersey who play the instrument. "As far as professional players? Unless someone has moved here from Manhattan lately, I think I'm it," he says.

It probably doesn't help his bottom line that he sometimes offers free lessons just to increase the pool of Garden State viol players. It's his religion; he constantly seeks converts -- and playing partners.

Not content to dedicate his life to one obscure instrument, Hutchinson, also champions a truly endangered species, the baryton (pronounced "baritone"). It's so arcane as to border on extinction -- classical music's equivalent of the duck-billed platypus: ungainly, fascinating and weird.

Early Music News called it "the most wondrously complicated of all instruments." Only a dozen or so people in the world still play it; his duet partner, Jeremy Brooker, lives in England.

It looks like a cello, yet its neck is twice as wide. It has six strings. Under them, protected by a complex construction that turns the fingerboard into a kind of a highway overpass, runs a second set of 10 strings.

The musician bows the strings with the right hand, fingers them with the left fingers, then plucks those secondary strings using the left thumb. This is more than patting your head while rubbing your stomach; it's doing all that while hopping on one foot. The brain has to send out three simultaneous sets of instructions.

Hutchinson's baryton playing popped up on YouTube last year when someone -- he doesn't know who -- posted a bit of his instruction video that is offered by the Viola da Gamba Society of America.

He and Brooker have recorded and performed together and are planning to tour Finland soon. Brooker calls Hutchinson "an exceptional musician, quick-thinking and intuitive."

"Freaking out" prohibited
All this musical passion has pretty much taken over Hutchinson's home. A half-dozen custom-made -- and oddly shaped -- musical cases stand in a corner like silent sentries. Three harpsichords have a home there -- theirs and two "temporarily" stored for friends. One almost expects him to insist a lute followed him home from school. At last count, he had 17 instruments, not including a closet full of recorders.

Roland Hutchinson plays treble viol as wife Gina Balestracci accompanies him on the harpsichord at their home in Montclair.

He switches from instrument to instrument with an effortlessness that astonishes professional musicians who have spent a lifetime mastering just one.

For example, playing all those instruments requires reading multiple clefs -- not just the bass and treble clefs of piano music, but the little-used clefs tailored to instruments that play in slightly different ranges.

Since this comes so easily to him, he has difficulty grasping how intimidating other people find that challenge. In his brochure offering free lessons, for example, he writes, "We have to learn to read a lot of different clefs in order to play all that music, but we learn them as we learn the instrument, so it´s no big deal. You are not permitted to freak out over the need to learn to read the alto clef or some other clef that you don´t know!"

His hobby: singing
"His knowledge is so extensive. Whenever I have a musical question, I go to him. But he's not at all snobby or anything -- he doesn't carry an air about him in any way," says friend Sheryl Reed-Herrera, a cellist with the Livingston Symphony Orchestra.

At a recent Mostly Mozart concert she attended with him, she noticed that he swayed in his seat, making tiny conducting gestures. "He feels the music so strongly, he can't hold himself back," she says. "He needs to express himself."

His main hobby -- if that is the correct term for something so closely related to his life's work -- is Sacred Harp choral singing, and its British equivalent, West Gallery. These are simple hymns with full-throated harmony -- a rural tradition also called shape note singing.

"His musical interests are extremely broad, and usually he's telling everything about them to people until their heads explode," says Balestracci, his wife.

Brooker says his duet partner has "an impressively loud voice which he never fails to demonstrate, with or without encouragement. He once invited me to an impromptu rendition of some traditional shape music singing in a bus terminus in Bratislava, a jaw-dropping experience which lives with me today."

"It's always a pleasure to make music with Roland," he wrote in an e-mail from England. "Just give me a moment to prepare myself if he is going to start singing."

Mathematical chops
The former math major has never left mathematics behind. He has always been fascinated by the intersection of math and music. At Stanford, Balestracci says, he oversaw the tuning of the university's pipe organ in two separate temperaments, or intervals between pitches -- a wickedly complex acoustical challenge.

"He's got the mathematical chops to deal with that," she says.

He dabbles in Linux as well, helping to find and fix errors in that open-source computer code -- although he downplays his contribution. "I turn in the odd bug report, and I've been known to find the offending code," he says with a shrug. He is a fan of Linux because, as he puts it, "I can't stand Microsoft."

As talkative as he can be about his passions, there is one question that renders him absolutely speechless, and that is: "What's your main objection to Microsoft?"

As he closes his eyes to consider his response, one senses a small war going on inside. On one hand, his visitor is about to leave and clearly doesn't have time for a hour-long indictment of Bill Gates and company. On the other hand, there is so much to say.

Finally, he opens his eyes. "The main thing wrong with it is, it has no taste," he declares. The fonts are ugly, the commands are inelegant and clunky. He has never used the Windows operating system -- ever -- and doesn't intend to.

Given these math and computer skills, has his wife ever felt he should scale back his musical activities and take a more lucrative job as a corporate IT guy?

"No. No!" she says, seemingly shocked at the assumption she might ever have had such a disloyal thought. "He would be bored out of his skull. And he does what he does so well: It's his gift to the world."

Additional Insight:
Graduate of: Beverly Hills High School
Published shape note hymn: "Hallelujah Now"
Latest CD: "Queer Fish," a collection of Haydn baryton duets
Upcoming concert tour: Finland
E-mail prefix: gambagur

"Who makes a living playing the viol? I think I know of about three people. As far as professional players? Unless someone has moved here from Manhattan lately, I think I'm it."
-- Roland Hutchinson

Published Aug. 26, 2007