On 10 Feb 2010, at 13:26, Dru Brooke-Taylor wrote: > I've a clear mental image of seeing somewhere, a photograph of an old street > musician playing what looked very like a strung kipper box. He was holding > it like a fiddle.
Hello Dru and others, This does sound extremely likely. People have always improvised string instruments using boxes that were immediately available. Even Fritz Kreisler is said to have begun on a cigar box fiddle. Though I wonder why a well-to-do cigar smoking Viennese family didn't just give him a real fiddle. I recently did some workshops in French primary schools, making instant instruments. One of these was a harp-like thing for which I requested substantial numbers of expanded-polystyrene boxes. I was sure these would be difficult to procure, and certainly didn't realise that the nearest town, La Rochelle, is a major fishing port. Perfect boxes were obtained in generous quantities, none of them smelling fishy, because they were all new. Whether or not there is a recollection or photo of a kipper box fiddle, it's a good bet that a few people will have tried this in the past, and may even have been pretty fair performers. Francis To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
