The Urge to Destroy a Violin
Since last summer, the Instagram account @violintorture has offered a riposte to the centuries-old craft of violin-making, or lutherie. “Can you still play a violin after cutting it up?” the account’s creator, Tyler Thackray, asked before sawing an instrument into thirds, to celebrate his ten thousandth follower. (The answer, somehow, is yes.) The basement of Thackray’s home in San Francisco, which he calls his “dungeon,” is filled with a pullulating population of misfit instruments, cobbled together from cheap violins that he acquires online. There is a violin with the strings installed underneath its body, so that it can only be played upside down. Another with no head, in a nod to the haunting of Ichabod Crane. A “slim-olin” conjured by slicing a violin in half. A violinist myself, I shuddered through a video in which a violin seems to writhe as Thackray saws off its scroll. Was this possibly an issue for the local A.S.P.C.A.?
In the four and a half centuries since the Cremonese luthier Andrea Amati helped bring the modern-day violin to life, the instrument has become an object of near-religious devotion. The commenters on Thackray’s Instagram fume over his sacrilegious antics: “I’m sure you’re a great person, but man do I hate this account,” one person writes. Thackray, who is thirty-nine and works as a software engineer, cannot actually play the violin—his primary instrument is the electric bass, though he also identifies as an amateur viola-da-gamba player—and many of the professional violinists whom he has e-mailed about trying his mutant instruments have refused. He feeds off the derision, describing himself as a button-pusher with a jones for arguing online. “I guess you could just call me an asshole,” he admitted during a Zoom call, while his twin pugs, Brucie and Bozu, snored in his lap. “There’s times where I will build a violin and think, Someone’s going to hate this. It’s one of my biggest motivations.”
