Paper Violin Building: Why and How
Above, a repurposed paper violin.
One of the classes I teach at the Corona Youth Music Project is called the "PreOrchestra." It is an orchestral initiation class, with the intent that students who graduate will be better equipped to start a violin, and to also participate in an ensemble environment.
How does one do this? Especially with... five year olds? Well, for the former we use paper violins; a concept that came out of the resourcefulness demanded of El Sistema teacher Josbel Puche when her program had students but no budget for instruments. The premise is similar to the box violins used in Suzuki instruction, though there are a few key differences I've noted:
It seems like many Suzuki teachers opt to create the box violin for students (or buy premade ones). In our program, we typically make it an event for the parents of our children to build the body of the instrument, which the teachers then affix all the additional pieces to.
Paula Bird writes in the afore-linked blog entry that Suzuki box violins are "easily made and replaceable." While making our paper violins are certainly easier to build than a real instrument, and COULD be replaced, we try to stress to our families that the children treat these just as they would a real violin, to instill the important of responsibility and care in handling an instrument. Also, as you'll see below, they're not that easy to make...
But in general, the idea is the same: to give the students the taste of having a violin, without the risks entailed of entrusting kindergartners with delicate instruments. There are a few different ways people make paper violins. JAMM (Juneau, Alaska Music Matters) has a blog post about their process, and YOLA (Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles) and the UCMP (Union City Music Project) have their "Paper violin cookbooks" here and here.
Below, I documented our process in the most recent batch of paper violins that were built in our program.
1) The body As mentioned before, the parents of our students made these bodies, with pre-cut cardboard pieces in the shape of the violin, and paper mache.
2) The button
You can use actual black buttons, but in this case I just covered some cardboard scraps with black duct tape, and used hot glue to put it in place.
3) The chin rest
We normally use cut-outs from apple containers (see the more typical CYMP paper violin above in the first image), but as you can probably tell I was short on time and materials, so I just cut out circles of blue construction paper.
4) The finger board and tailpiece
More cardboard scraps, more black duct tape, and more hot glue!
5) The bridge, strings, tuning pegs, and scroll
The bridge and strings were by far the most annoying part to make. You need to cut out the bridge shape from cardboard, and then using a very strong needle, sew the string through the cardboard, and then the top of the tail piece. What you see is actually two pieces of string; the ends are at the top of the violin, with the middle looped through the tail piece. It's hard to see in these photos, but there are also tuning pegs, and I added scrolls (something my previous PreOrchestra classes had not had on their paper violins). The tuning pegs are dowels that have been pre-cut to size, and affixed with hot glue. The scroll was actually a paper towel roll that I cut and then rolled up (with.. more hot glue), and I attached that before gluing on the pegs.
And here's a photo of what our final product looked like this time around. Our PreOrchestra kids have already put these violins to good use by using these to perform This is My Violin, and they are going to start learning how to hold the instrument between their chin and shoulders, and experiment with bowing and plucking the strings.
