On October 19, students, faculty, staff, and members of the local Bryant community gathered in Janikies auditorium to experience history being made. When President Ronald K. Machtley walked on stage, microphone in hand, the lights dimmed, and he began to introduce the performers who had come so far to play for everyone.

The Hutchins Consort is comprised of eight professional string musicians, all from the West coast of the United States, who travel the world showing off the brilliance of Dr. Carleen Hutchins who dedicated her life to reinventing the violin.

The eight members of the consort each play a different version of the violin that ranges from the highest pitch alto violin (about 1.5 feet in length) to the deep voice of the contra bass violin (over 8 feet tall). Each instrument is handcrafted to perfection and there are less than six complete sets in the entire world.

The Hutchins group is the only live performing group with these violins in the world.

Their repertoire ranged from classic opera to Romanian dances (that were quite recognizable to the crowd) to modern compositions written by the players themselves. However, the different pieces that were played could have appealed to a number of musical tastes because of the variety that they exhibit. This is a specialty of a group like the Hutchins consort.

As a musician myself, I had no idea what to expect when they started playing. However, when they took their cue for the first song, I was blown away. The different sounds and the intricate rhythms of each player came together to form these seamless classic pieces and it was hard to believe there were only eight people on stage. At certain times, the alto violin almost acted as the electric guitar voice throughout the song.

As an audience member, you could feel the emotion radiating from the consort because of their body language. If a song was fast and playful, the members, specifically the first violin player Chris Woods, would dance and skip around the stage and throughout the audience to make everyone feel immersed in the music.

If a song was slow and emotional, the soloist – for this example, the second violin player actually started crying towards the end of her piece – would reveal his or her raw emotions through their facial expressions and in the way they swayed with the shape of the musical line or theme.

Overall I had a great experience at the Hutchins Consort concert, not only because I am a classical musician myself, and I enjoy live music, but because these eight musicians have been crafting their skills throughout their lives, and the passion and creativity they demonstrate through playing their violins is truly inspiring.

It was an honor for Bryant to host such a performance on our campus, and it was definitely worth attending. Be on the lookout for future events such as the President's Cultural Series!

In 1967, the violin underwent a radical change. Carleen Maley Hutchins (1911-2009) created eight different violins whose collective tonal range corresponds to that of a piano.

Instead of one kind of violin, which is played in string quartets and orchestras, there was now a "family" of violins, just as there had been a family of recorders and other instruments. Each family member came in a different size, from the 7-foot contrabass to the 11-inch treble. And each played a different range of notes. But the violin sound remained essentially the same from instrument to instrument.

Local listeners will be able to see and hear Hutchins' violins on Sunday when members of Hutchins Consort, a violin octet, present a concert in Kulynych Auditorium at Wake Forest University.

"It's a whole new palette of sound," D. Quincy Whitney said of the octet. "It's the most exciting thing that's happened in the string world in 350 years. You suddenly have the whole range across the piano, in strings, which has never been done before."

Whitney, a WFU alumna, is writing Hutchins' biography with the goal of publishing it next year. She will give a short pre-concert talk about how she met Hutchins and started to write a book about her.

Joe McNalley is the artistic director of the Hutchins Consort, which is touring the East Coast in honor of the 100th anniversary of Hutchins' birth. The group is based in Southern California.

"They allow a different approach to a lot of music," he said of the octet's instruments. "You can perform works that normally would require much larger forces."

McNalley also said his group's violins either extend ranges beyond those of conventional string instruments or fill in "gaps" in ranges created between such instruments as the viola and the cello.

"It's as if you had never seen the color orange before," he said. "You've seen red and you've seen yellow, but you didn't know that orange existed between them."

Hutchins lived most of her life in Montclair, N.J., and she summered in New Hampshire, where Whitney, once an arts reporter for The Boston Globe, first met and interviewed her. While her octet's instruments encountered resistance from educators and others, Hutchins' innovations as a maker of violins and violas have been felt across the world, Whitney said.

Hutchins was a biologist, a trumpet player and a prep-school science teacher before a series of serendipitous events led her to teach herself acoustical physics by making violins and violas with greater projection, power and resonance. Hutchins "really ushered in the modern era of violin-building," McNalley said. "The overall quality has gone way up. It's largely because of her efforts that that happened."

Whitney said Hutchins "did more for the field of violinmaking than any other violinmaker since (Antonio) Stradivari," the famed maker of string instruments still used today. Stradivari lived from 1644 to 1737.

Hutchins made "expendable" instruments – which allowed scientists to experiment without fear of destroying an instrument otherwise meant for performance, Whitney said. Hutchins also created a forum for the exchange of information through the Catgut Acoustical Society and its scientific journal, which she published.

Hutchins "brought a feminine paradigm to it and said, 'What if we actually talked to each other and shared information, as scientists do,'" Whitney said. "More and more luthiers are learning how to make better instruments because of the openness that started with Carleen Hutchins."

Behind Hutchins East, a new string octet that made its debut on Thursday night at the Tank, a performing-arts space on West 45th Street in Manhattan, there is a singular and more than slightly quixotic story. The ensemble was assembled to play the so-called new violin family designed and built by Carleen Hutchins, a luthier who during the 1950s sought to enable a putative musical revolution from her home workshop in Montclair, N.J.

Mrs. Hutchins, who died in August, was spurred by a request from the avant-garde composer Henry Brant. He wanted a range of instruments that would share the specific tonal qualities of a violin instead of the varying sounds produced by the modern viola, cello and double bass. A decade of experimentation resulted in a set of eight violins ranging in size from the 11-inch treble to the 7-foot contrabass, each pitched half an octave apart.

"We need to revise all the orchestral instruments," an evidently delighted Leopold Stokowski said after attending the first concert played on the Hutchins violins in May 1965. Traditions being hard to shake, and investments in conventional instruments harder to shirk, the new violin family failed to catch on, though Yo-Yo Ma used a Hutchins alto violin on his 1994 recording of the Bartok Viola Concerto.

That adventurous musicians might be attracted to the potential of the Hutchins instruments is no surprise. Among the Hutchins East members were three players from the Jack Quartet and one from the International Contemporary Ensemble, groups known for their envelope-pushing repertories. The treble violinist Christopher Otto, the alto violinist Emily DuFour and the bass violinist Joe McNalley have played in the Hutchins Consort, a group in Southern California.

Both benefits and shortcomings were evident in the concert, presented in observance of what would have been Mrs. Hutchins's 99th birthday. In Mr. Otto's arrangement of the Kyrie from Palestrina's Missa Galilaei, you heard a smoothly blended purr that was uniform from top to bottom, like that of a Renaissance viol consort. But Bach's Concerto for Three Violins (BWV 1064) sounded gimmicky despite a clever arrangement and spirited playing: the treble violin sometimes squeaked like a toy, while the bass and contrabass lacked warmth and heft.

Where the instruments worked best was in modern pieces that took advantage of their acoustical properties. Brant's "Consort for True Violins" opened with ruminative solos and duos that demonstrated each instrument's voice; roiling ensemble passages had a surprising transparency. In Mr. Otto's newly composed "Castor and Pollux" high-pitched violins playing in their lowest ranges were paired with lower counterparts played at extreme highs, producing rich concords and hypnotic washes of wavering, throbbing overtones.

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The Hutchins Consort, a string octet from Southern California, appeared at the 2010 Ortiz Festival to entertain the public in Alamos, Sonora, with a program titled "Music of the Californios".

The thirty two strings (of the eight violins) elicited unceasing, enthusiastic applause, and even laughter, for each of the pieces they performed on the instruments designed and crafted since 1955 by the luthier Carleen Hutchins.

The idea of these instruments is to explore and exploit the entire range of sounds that a violin can produce; from the miniature "Treble", tuned an octave higher than a regular violin, to the Contrabass Violin, tuned an octave lower than a 'cello.

Just as the performers needed to adapt their string playing techniques (or invent new ones!) to master the creations of Doctor Hutchins, most of the arrangements, by [Artistic Director Joe McNalley], composer in residence Fred Charlton, or Treble violinist Chris Woods, were written especially to exploit the instruments' capabilities.

The four women and four men that formed the octet were joined by the beautiful African-American Soprano, Lauren Smith, whose festive attire and coquettish stage presence accentuated the self-assurance and easy manner of the group.

Yet she displayed confidence and ease on such works as the Bachiannas Brasileiras Number 5, and "O Mio Babbino Caro" from Puccini's opera "Gianni Schicchi", a collection Spanish songs by Obradors, and a suite of three traditional songs "of the Californios", that gave the name to the program.

These melodies, while nominally from "Alta California" (the Spanish name for the territory of Northern California lost to the US in 1848) clearly evinced their origin and heritage as "Music of the Méxican Salon", especially the first two: "Las Blancas Flores"and "Los Celos de Carolina".

The title of the last song, "Vienen Los Yankees", laments the loss of native culture by a people displaced from their homeland.

The purely instrumental works demonstrated the Consort's mastery of a variety of styles and repertoire: from Bach's serious "[organ] Prelude in D-major" to an elaborate jazzy version of Gershwin's "Summertime" (from "Porgy and Bess"), which, curiously, was performed without the soprano.

But without doubt the highlights of the concert were the spectacular arrangements of "Fandango" of Antonio Soler and the celebrated "Hungarian Rhapsody, No. 2" of Franz Liszt, popularized in a Bugs Bunny cartoon (as described by one of the musicians in faltering Spanish, in contrast to the singing of the sensual Lauren) and during which the charismatic [treble violinist Chris Woods] left the stage and went into the audience to demonstrate his virtuosity and brilliance of his violin.

The enthusiasm of the audience remained undiminished and could only increase for the final two works: "Ghost Riders in the Sky" ("Jinetes en el cielo" in Spanish), the famous 50's hit by San Jones, and the "Bohemian" rhapsody of Freddie Mercury [front-man for the rock band "Queen"].

Without doubt this was a very special evening for the Festival and a dazzling presentation by an invited ensemble, judging by the "Californiated Smiles" worn by all on the way out of City Hall.