Stewart Pollens

Stewart Pollens is an expert on historical musical instruments. His work includes restoration, analysis, and scholarly publication; and it embraces keyboard instruments (the harpsichord and fortepiano) as well as historical stringed instruments such as the violin and cello. Andrew Manze has called him "one of the world’s foremost authorities on musical instruments."

Stewart Pollens was born in New York in 1949 and trained as a violin and keyboard-instrument maker. In the 1970s, he apprenticed with harpsichord builder John Challis and studied violin-making with Mittenwald faculty at the University of New Hampshire. From 1976 to 2006 he served as the Conservator of Musical Instruments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His work there included the restoration and maintenance of the museum's encyclopedic collection of over 5,000 instruments, as well as research, writing, and lecturing on the collection.

After leaving the Metropolitan Museum, Pollens formed Violin Advisor, LLC, a consulting firm that authenticates and evaluates fine violins. In addition to his work there, Pollens restores stringed and early keyboard instruments for private collectors and museums (including an early New York piano for the Merchant's House Museum, an English bentside spinet for the Van Cortland House, and a Viennese fortepiano for the Morris-Jumel Mansion). He has done keyboard restoration and recording preparation work for Leonard Bernstein, Paul Badura-Skoda, John Browning, Mieczyslaw Horszowski, Byron Janis, Igor Kipnis, and many others. Among the more unusual instruments that he has restored are an accordion once owned by Alice "In Wonderland" P. Liddell and a tambourine painted by Toulouse-Lautrec.

Throughout his two careers as museum conservator and independent conservator and consultant, Pollens has carried out extensive historical research (see sections below for his books and a list of scholarly articles); and he is a contributor to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and The Strad.

Pollens is married to the concert violinist Stephanie Chase.

Pollens's research findings include the source of the design for the decorative inlay of Stradivari 's "Greffuhle" violinand a chemical analysis of Stradivari's violin varnish. In 1999, 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.

Books

The Violin Forms of Antonio Stradivari (1992) 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. It was described by one reviewer as "the standard work on the evolution of Stradivarius's designs."

Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù (1994) 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. Pollens contributed the chapter on dendrochronology, a scientific procedure used to determine the age of the wood used in making violins.

The Early Pianoforte (1995) traces the history of the piano from its invention up to the mid 18th century. It offers thorough coverage of the career of Bartolomeo Cristofori, widely acknowledged as having invented the piano in Florence around 1700, but rather contentiously suggests that Cristofori should not be called the instrument's inventor. In support of this claim it carefully goes through the threads of evidence that can be found for the existence of piano-like instruments dating as far back as 1440. The book examines the work of makers including Henri Arnaut de Zwolle, 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 (2001) Pollens and co-author Henryk Kaston provide a technical description of Francois Tourte's working methods and offer new biographical facts based upon previously unpublished documents discovered in French archives.

Stradivari (2010) includes new biographical information and detailed analyses of Stradivari's workshop materials preserved in the Museo Stradivariano in Cremona.

The Manual of Musical Instrument Conservation (2015) is the first comprehensive guide to the care and maintenance of historic instruments.

Bartolomeo Cristofori and the Invention of the Piano will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2016.

• American Musical Instrument Society's Nicholas Bessaraboff Prize, 1997 for The Early Pianoforte.
• Profiles of Pollens have appeared in Sinfonica (March, 1999), City Journal (Spring, 1995), Continuo (April, 1989), and American Lutherie 20 (Winter, 1989).
• In 2002, Pollens was featured playing the world's oldest surviving piano, the Cristofori piano of 1720, on WNET television.
• 2011 Choice "Outstanding Academic Title" award for Stradivari.
• Interviews:
  • "What Exalts Stradivarius? Not Varnish, Study Says", New York Times, December 4, 2009
  • "Why Cellos Sound Lousy in Bad Weather", Slate, January 26, 2009.