Reinhard Vanbergen - The Marduk Gate (Presenting The Cello) - 0236

Reinhard Vanbergen presents The . Project (The Gates Of Babylon). Over history, stringed instruments have evolved and finally became standardized as the violin, viola, cello and double bass we know today. Their evolution has always been closely tied to the ever-changing needs of musicians and composers. Unfortunately, the increased standardisation that followed after the ‘golden age of violin making’ under makers like Stradivari and Guarneri has led to the decline of bowed instruments that did not fit within this standardisation. If you look at the issue from the perspective of voicings, four voices have been ‘forgotten’: Two instruments with a higher pitch than the violin, one in between the viola and the cello, and one in between the cello and the double bass. This brings us to the modern string octet. The idea to create a string octet by filling up the missing voices is not new. Violinmaker and researcher Carleen Hutchins (USA 1911-2009) developed such an octet, re-designing the string